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tv   Public Affairs  CSPAN  December 24, 2012 12:00pm-5:00pm EST

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>> i grew up here. [applause] >> we will come back to this program in a minute. the house is coming in for a brief session as negotiations continue on the so-called fiscal cliff. the speaker pro tempore: the
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house will be in order. the chair lays before the house a communication from the speaker. the secretary: the speaker's rooms, washington, d.c. december 24, 2012. i hereby appoint the honorable mac thornberry to act as speaker pro tempore on this day. signed, john a. boehner, speaker of the house of representatives. the speaker pro tempore: the brare will be offered by our chaplain, father conroy. chaplain conroy: god of light, we give you thanks for giving us another day, as this chamber lies silent, we pray for joy, hope, and love within the homes of the members of the people's house. send us your spirit so that there might be peace on earth, good will among all men and women. all that is done this day be for your great honor and glory. amen. the speaker pro tempore: the chair has examined the journal of the last day's proceedings and announces to the house his approval thereof.
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pursuant to clause 1 of rule 1, the journal stands approved. the share will lead the house in the pledge of allegiance. i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. the chair lays before the house a communication. the clerk: the honorable the speaker, house of representatives. sir, pursuant to the permission granted in clause 2-h of rule 2 of the rules of the us us house of representatives, the clerk received the following message from the secretary of the senate on december 21, 2012, at 4:04 p.m. that the senate agreed to the conference report accompanying the bill, h.r. 4310. with best wishes i am signed sincerely, karen l. haas. the speaker pro tempore: without objection, when the house adjourns today it shall adjourn to meet at 20:00 p.m.
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on thursday, december 27, 2012. without objection, the committees may have until the end of the second session to file the final report pursuant to clause 1-b of rule 11, and the chair of the committee in consultation with its ranking ranking member before filing such report may update report to reflect committee or house action taken after the report was ordered reported or made available to the members of the committee. pursuant to subparagraph d-3 provided that the chair promptly notifies the members of the committee. the chair lays before the house an additional communication. the clerk: the honorable the speaker, house of representatives. sir, this is to notify you formally pursuant to rule 8 of the rules of the house of representatives that i have been served with a subpoena issued by district court of the state of north carolina, wake county, for documents and testimony in a civil case to which i am not a party.
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after consultation with the office of general counsel, i will determine whether compliance with the subpoena is consistent with the privileges and rights of the house. signed, sincerely, david russell, district liaison, u.s. representative david price. the speaker pro tempore: without objection, the house stands adjourned until 2:00
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>> we are going back to the conference on women in leadership with andrea mitchell and nancy-ann deparle. >> she gave me the notion i could do anything i wanted to do. >> how did she do that? >> she had very high expectations and let me know she expected me to do well in school. when i would talk to her about wanting to work in the white house for being interested in politics or being a lawyer, she said you have to study hard and make good grades. you need to get a scholarship because i will not be able to afford it. she never said -- the sky was the limit. that really was her view. it made me think i could do
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anything. i did go to law school. in the early 1980's when i got out of law school, i went back to tennessee to practice. i was going around to law firms. there were not that many women in the law firms. i had guys interview me. they would sit me down and say, do you understand you have to try cases? >> [laughter] >> i said that is what i wanted to do and was excited about it. i have clients in the beginning, i would go in to meet them. afterwards, one of my partners would say that they say that was not what i expected. he did not know there was going to be a lady lawyer on this case. but i really liked trying cases. it was a lot of fun. then i was drawn into politics.
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throughout my career, i have been interested in how to change things for the better. i have been very fortunate to have lots of opportunities to serve. >> you mentioned your mother. your mother died of lung cancer. she was such a force in your life. >> i think it made me very strong because it was very clear i had no one to depend on but me. >> 3 the oldest? >> i was the middle. i had two brothers. i guess it makes you tough at an early age. it made me realize there were a lot of things i wanted to get done in life. i felt driven to succeed.
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life is short. i wanted to be sure i had the chance to experience it. >> you touched on this that it was a distinct thing that you were a woman. if you were a man, how would it be different? how did being a woman affect your career? >> i was thinking when she was talking about sandra day o'connor not being able to the job. this goes. generations. -- this goes back generations. it is surprisingly still present in subtle ways. everything would have been different if i have not been a woman. i would not have had the joy of being a woman, mentoring women, and the sisterhood that we are. last night on nbc nightly news,
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i think this was a first for us. we have four women in our bureau that work for nightly news. last night, all four of us were on the air. we were the four correspondence from washington. that was really exciting. and realized that halfway through the show and sent them messages. it was very cool. that would have never happen. it would have been easier for me. i felt i had to volunteer for everything and that i was judged by a much tougher standard. i had to work weekends. when i first want to cover the reagan white house, i was coming in at the bottom. i was the number four correspondent. i had to look for any chance to break through and cover the big
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stories. i felt i had to be there every day to observe ronald reagan. i was still covering the energy crisis and three mile island and other things. >> on tv news, there is so much attention to what women on tv where and what they look like. is that still true? >> there was an article. >> i saw that article. >> there was a story recently about what women anchors are wearing. it was only about women. >> it seemed a little silly. i think the exciting thing is we're covering major beats, we have women in very important roles. we now have women executive
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producers. s runningice president group the broadcasts and making decisions. >> you do not feel that women get promoted on tv for looks? >> i am sure in some cases, yes. my experience has been in more than 34 years with nbc news and before that i was at 10 and 9, and was recruited from philadelphia to come here by them. had two very happy years there. nobody has ever said to me -- maybe once i was wearing something with polka dots. i thought i looked very chic. in my ear, i heard the producers say if you ever wear that
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again, i will murder you or something. but nobody ever said anything to me about the obvious. it is a visual medium and you have to be presentable. there have been major breakthroughs. women are now visibly aging on television. women of all sizes and descriptions are doing important on camera work because they are smart. it is a breakthrough. >> i want to ask you one more question about hair. you have covered hillary clinton. there is enormous chatter about her hair. >> this is so annoying. it goes back to the head and in 1992. -- it goes back to the headband in 1992.
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"washington post" has a new poll indicating her strong popularity. i cover her. i see the pluses and minuses, the good, bad, whatever. she is big things in this transition. when she was running for senate, it was not evident the former first lady could do that job. she came in quietly under the radar. there were than 13 women in the senate. she became a team player and developed key alliance. she proved herself to the point where she was considered a credible national candidate. she came in second for the
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nomination and ran a strong campaign. i think she has inspired a lot of people and worked very hard. the rest of her story is yet to be told. her hair is the least important thing about her. >> polls are showing her very high. that can coexist with people you have enormous respect for. >> what if instead of going to meetings and working hard, she was getting fluffed? then we would be writing about the excess of money and time she was putting into her appearance. >> i want to move to science. it is such a huge thing these days about the lack of women in science. in some universities, only 10% of the teachers are female.
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what can we do to get more women motivated to go into science and why is it important? >> >> talk about why they are not there first. it begins very early in terms of which women are exposed to, the expectations. it is a lot of hard work. science is a funny business because one is not always in the limelight. that is kind of public affirmation that is not there until one is a fair distance down the road and becomes an instant entrepreneur or something like that. a lot of what happens to women will happen within the community within which they work. a lot of the attitudes get
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reinforced. i think what needs to happen is we have to try to reach young women early. we have to affirm them. as a society, we have to value science and those who do it more. everything we like to play with, including broadcast media and health care, they are rooted in scientific discovery and technological innovation. there has to be a greater appreciation for the role of science and technology in society. we have to get young women engaged early. we found that if young women are engaged in experiments to work, if they are part of the team, it makes a big difference. we try to create an intergene
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rational mentoring system. when young women come through the ranks through the promotion and tenure process, we have to ensure fairness of the system. it is a complex problem. that is why it is hard for people to talk about it. >> why is it important that there are more women? >> it is important that there be more science. we are about to face what i call the quiet crisis. you have a number of scientists in this country who came of age when i did. they are beginning to retire. those retirements are going to accelerate over the next few years. the second hidden variable is that we depend strongly on
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immigrants. we have always been a nation of immigrants. i do not think people appreciate how much of our science and engineering work force is made up of those, 40%, 30% plus of the master's degrees. >> 40% a ph these are from other countries. >> that is good. it says we are attractive. the rage about immigration policy, but the world is changing so people are having opportunities back home. other countries want them. we do not -- if we do not understand that, we will lose out. the reason i say is a quiet crisis is to have a group that represents about 5% of the work force that has driven 50% of gdp force.
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>> 5% of the workforce are engineers and scientists. usa in the value is -- >> it is a multiplicative factor. if people come and do not stay, it is quiet. by the time we recognize it, it is a crisis because it takes years and decades to create a high performance scientist or engineer. i am voice the serious one on these panels. this is serious stuff. >> basically we need more women because -- >> women have a unique perspectives. we find women tend to go into fields that relate to things that touch people's lives. they are strongly in biomedical engineering, chemical engineering, biology.
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they make unique contributions because they bring a holistic perspective you do not always find in some of our young men. we find when we put them together, the young men and women, the influence each other. the women learn to think in ways that are little different, but the men as well begin to develop this other perspective. it is fun to watch. >> you have been at the heart of one of the most divisive and important things going on in america, health care reform. when you are working this hard on something that's so many people desperately want and see us so vital, and then other people think it is the worst thing that has ever happened to america, how do you keep going and put the criticism in perspective? >> you have to remember when i
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started doing this, it was not clear it was such a polarizing issue. the president asked me to work on this issue in march of 2009, actually february. it appeared from the summit of the white house that there were republicans and democrats talking about how to do something to address the problems of cost and getting people access to quality health care. there were truly a bipartisan discussions going on. i hit the ground running and was part of those. i spent hours on capitol hill meeting with republicans and putting together bills with the senate and house that had a lot of ideas that came out of republican quarters. the whole thing was based on the massachusetts plan from a
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republican governor. we consulted with a lot of people that worked on it. it was not always clear it would be so divisive. towards the end, i remember feeling this made -- feeling dismayed and disoriented the day the house voted. i had been there with my oldest son who was 11 at the time, thinking how wonderful it was going to be that he would grow and the country where he would think it was strange when he heard there was a time we used to say someone could not get insurance or that women would have a different price than men for health insurance or that there would be like time limits -- lifetime limits and that people used to go without care. that seemed like a huge moment
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of progress for our country. then to walk out and see people with signs yelling was disorienting. i believe in saw this with the president on the campaign trail -- i believe and saw this with the president on the campaign trail. there is another deputy chief of staff. we found ourselves both on marine one with the communications director and a military aide who is a woman. basically almost everyone on there was a woman. the president looked around. he did not say anything. we wondered if he noticed. that has been a lot of fun. i would like to think and what i saw on the campaign trail was the president was not hearing
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the stories about insurance companies, he is hearing things are getting better. >> what is your favorite part of the health care overhaul? what is the thing you really wanted? >> it is hard for me to choose. i would say banning the practice of excluding people with pre-existing conditions. that does not make any sense to say that someone who has been set -- been sick could not go out and buy insurance. my mother would go to work even when she was sick of going through chemotherapy and needed to be home because she was worried about losing her job and insurance and not being able to be there for us. that was a driver for me. i am proud to work for a
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president willing to risk his career to fight for this. >> there is all this noise and criticism. how do you stay focused? you have a drive. you feel like what you are doing is the right thing. there are a lot of obstacles. how do you stay focused? >> i think all of us have this experience. you have to tell yourself it is important to listen to everyone and be respectful and try to understand problems people have with it. but in the end, you have a job to do. that is to get the best product closest to what congress intended as possible. we always need to listen. i learn something every day from talking to someone i do not agree with. >> shirley is going to say
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something and then we will go to the floor for questions. >> i have a question. how did things get so bollixed up? clearly, people benefit from the various things she is talking about. some of them are convinced this is a bad thing. do we understand that? i am not trying to take over your job. >> i encourage this. >> another example that was hard for me to get my head around, as a correspondent, i have to understand all points of view. that was the 61-38 vote in the senate on the disability treaty which is basically replicating
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what has been american policy since george herbert walker bush 22 years ago negotiated this with congress. it was proposed as a treaty by george w. bush. it was advocated by john mccain and the wounded warriors and the chamber of commerce and john kerry and bob dole. it was voted down including five key votes from friends and colleagues of bob dole. it was all over what the senate foreign relations committee -- the hearings indicated the black helicopters were not coming. this was not some crazy requirement on america. we already have the standard. it was that 26 other countries
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have ratified this. it went down. i am still trying to understand the opposition. >> would you think? >> i think it is fear. it is not based on fact or reality. someone is able to hype this notion we are agreeing to a one world government by ratified this treaty which simply embodies what has been our law for decades. the chamber endorsed it. but there is this year. -- but there is this fear of the government and being required to be accountable for having health
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insurance, the so-called mandate, even though there is help if you need it. >> the velocity of information through social media, radio, and tv, there is a lot of false information and it gets amplified so rapidly now. it is very hard for the facts to catch up. >> what do you tell the consumer of news and information? how do they get the best? >> i say to be a smart consumer who goes to as many different sources as possible. the consumer. if you were buying a car, he would check out -- you check out the whole record of the vehicle. be a consumer. there is a lot of information.
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it can be interesting and informative. when it comes to the factual record, know where to go. >> let's go to the floor for questions. >> my name is gloria. i come from europe. everybody talks about [indiscernible] most of us [indiscernible] we are the only ones that can produce babies. i was wondering with the crazy schedule you mentioned working until midnight how you balance family time and a career. the mother is the most important role in the family and for the
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child. the child is the future of everything we're talking about. how can a woman in the united states be independent with a career if she has had a child with no maternity leave? united states is way behind most other countries. they have maternity leave. there should not be fair when she goes to an interview -- there should not be fear when going to an interview. >> does anyone want to take that? >> i would be happy to do that. >> i have always gotten up at
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4:30 or 5:00. i have a son. he is grown of now. when i get up, he is off living his life. my husband and i have always been in similar careers. that really helps a lot. over the years, i made choices on what i would do in order to create the flexibility for me to raise our son. i do think that is very important. the one thing i will say about universities, we do have more family friendly policies. we have not just maternity leave, but family leave so that if a family adopted child, there is time that they can have of. we will stop the tenure clock
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for women if they are pregnant. then they can pick up. all of these things are important. we find it has the young woman the bunch more productive region be much more productive -- we find it has the young woman be much more productive than if we did not have that. >> i have two sons were now 11 and 13. they were younger when i started with president obama. it has been a struggle. it is very difficult. my husband has taken on more of the load. he was active before but has taken on much more. a lot of days, i leave so early i am getting them up when i leave. when i come home, it is time for them to go to bed. it is a struggle.
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i think that is why there are fewer women at the top in some professions. there is a lot of self- selection. you choose to go on a different path because you do not want to sacrifice your family life. >> i have not had the blessing of children so my work ethic is strange, to say the least. i am there all the time. i live near the bureau and employees there in an emergency. my foreign policy summit is to be there when there are emergencies around the world. i have colleagues i grew up with, judy woodruff has three children, including a child with special needs. compton has four children. producers are having children
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and coming back. our top producer is married to someone on the hill with two kids at home. she travels with the president all the time. there are ways. corporations are much more flexible in broadcasting now. alexander wallace, one of our top executives, ann curry with family. it can be done. it involves a lot of tough tradeoffs. our corporate culture ought to be more forgiving in support of. sadly, that is rarely the case. >> i was the chairman of the nrc. my son was entering high school. we made the decision not to move here to not disruptive.
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we left him in the school he was in. that means my husband during the week did everything. as much as i could, i went home every weekend. i did not participate in the washington social scene all the time. but we felt it was important to do the public service, but especially important we kept stability in our son's life. >> we will take another question. go ahead. >> i was wondering if being a female it changes the perspective of how people look at you. >> because you are a woman, are you perceived differently? >> i would say yes. i worked at bell labs doing theoretical physics research for a number of years.
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>> were there a ton of women? [laughter] >> no. the vice president of research was a nobel prize winner. he sat down to talk to me one day. he said you are always going to have this halo effect, not because you are an angel. when you get up to talk, there will be a lot of light on you. people will really what you. you can either have it make you run away or you can decide to optimize and do the best you can. that is what i have always done. over time, it builds and helps you. i do find sometimes it is hard for men to deal with women that are strong in the workplace. >> we're running out of time. i want to end with asking each of the women what they wished they would have known at 17 that
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would have made this easier. andrea says to never permit others to decide your goals. decide what you want and go for it. >> i was very fortunate in that my parents have always told me i could do anything, as your mom told you. i never felt there were limits until i got into my first job out of college and discovered all of the limits. when i graduated college, i was 20. i wish i had known i could do everything i have done because it was always a struggle at first. if i had more confidence in myself, it would have been a lot easier all along. if i had known i could compete and did not have to defer to my male colleagues as much, not
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even my bosses, but always been the one to help them. it was as though i were somehow not as good as they. is one thing to be a collegial. but you really need to stand up for yourself. the other thing i have learned over the years and is one of the reason being a woman in these careers is so much fun is that i have been able to bring along, higher, and promotes so many younger woman. women who have taken leadership roles in the company. it is a continual process. they are having the careers some of us could only dream of in management as well. >> shirley ann has said something similar to you.
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and for the stars. >> my father always said aim for the stars and you can reach the treetops. i always thought if i did not get to the stores quickly, i have failed. his point was if you do not aim high, you will not go far. imbedded in the message is that there are steps along the way. you do have to decide your view is higher than where you are. i have tried to live my life that way. >> you made a point to say it is also important to take time to relax and enjoy friends. >> i said to take time to smell the roses. when claire sent me that question, it took me back to
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when i was 17 with the struggles of was having facing my mother's death and being on my own. probably not having as much self-confidence as i needed, but realizing i had to pull it together and manage that. i did a really good job for the next decade of striving and pushing forward professionally. probably did not take time to enjoy life as much as i should have. when i look back now, when i was studying in england, i wish i had taken more time to travel instead of hitting the books as much. i think that is what i would do differently now i am getting some of that through my children now. >> what a panel. i cannot thank you enough. [applause] it is not every day we get such fantastic diversity and brainpower. we're going to take a short
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break and be back with our next discussion in a little bit. >> we continue with the conference on women in leadership. denyce graves and susan lyne talk about how they use networking in their careers. >> thank you so much for being here. i am thrilled to have susan lyne and denyce graves. we were supposed to have cathy lanier, but she got sick. we're going to have a great panel. let me give you a bit of background. do you know about gilt groupe? they have created a craze for women all over the country frantically bidding.
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it is expected to go public in 2013. everyone is excited about that. susan has had an amazing career starting in traditional media moving into roles at abc and disney and then serving as president of martha stewart living. she was responsible for the launch of "dust. housewives -- she was responsible for the launch of "desperate housewives" and "lost." one colleague said her role is fast moving and innovative. it describes her perfectly. "money" describes her like this. she wears her leadership mantle as a cashmere shawl. her ego is the last thing you notice about her. in other words, if she does not
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act like a man. denyce was born and raised in the sea by a single mother. she is a world-renowned opera star. she studied at the duke ellington school for the arts and went on to study elsewhere. she debuted at the metropolitan opera house in new york in 1995. she has performed on four continents and song with all the greats in the industry. "the new york times" said this. "she has a classic voice with a wide range. from her low voice to her top notes, she is a compelling stage actress. if anything, she underestimates her charisma." the critic noted that his
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favorite moment was after her arrest, sitting on a table with her hands tied behind her back, she slowly lifted her skirt above her knees with her teeth. he wrote that from that moment, she had the audience enthralled. thank you both for being here. >> i have just had knee surgery. we were at the kennedy center honors. my husband said it will be difficult to lift your skirt with your teeth. >> i want to start with a question for both of you. was there one person who was your mentor role model and inspired you to be where you are now? >> i started off in the magazine industry. i cannot say i had a mentor early on. the person who inspired me most
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is probably clay falker. he started "new york" magazine. he recognized the city was changing and there was this new middle-class audience that did not have their own publication. he created the magazine. it was different from anything we have seen before. it was so different it sort of took your breath away. it was deeply impressive to me. he got wonderful writers. he was all for subjective takes on things. he loved being provocative. he largely created the new york
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city we now know, certainly the point of view. it inspired me because i have always looked up to people who sea change taking place and look at that as an opportunity instead of a threat. a couple of years before he died, i went to see him. he died about five years ago. he was at berkeley and at the time in his late 70's. he was running the graduates' magazine program at uc. he had serious cancer. it was very hard to understand him. he was still so excited about the student projects. he spent the entire morning taking me through these magazines his graduate students had created. he was an optimist and
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passionate about his work right to the end. it was also very instructive to recognize it is not work if you love what you do. >> let me follow-up on that. you have spoken about how you have never taken the easy path. you are drawn to where the heat is. that takes a tremendous amount of courage. why are you drawn to that? >> i do not know the answer completely except that i grew up as the oldest daughter and oldest granddaughter in a large irish catholic family in boston, very conservative. i came of age in the late 1960's and early 1970's. the world was changing. i have to make a decision about whether i was going to do with generations before had done or
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try to do something different. i think it was unbelievably difficult for my parents. i dropped out of berkeley. there were a lot of things i did early that were probably unusual at that moment. but i have also been excited and lucky enough to be alive and working at times of great change. my original path came largely out of the fact i like being part of the anti-war movement and women's movement. i was not ever going to be the person in front of the microphone giving the speech, but i could be there as a reporter. i could be there as someone
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trying to understand all that was taking place. that set a course for me in life. if i could be where change was happening, i would be a happier and more challenged person. >> it worked out for you will. denyce, you grew up in washington in a tough neighborhood. in this article, you noted that a lot of people saw you as a space alien for the dreams he had of being an opera singer. i want to ask whether you had a mentor that inspired you. where did this a dream come from being an opera singer? >> i think is one of those careers that chooses its disciples.
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i think it shows me and not the other way around. >> did you grow up listening to opera? >> not at all. i am not coming from an experience where we listened to classical music or anything else apart from gospel music. >> your mother did not let you listen to pop music. >> she did not, but i used to sneak in the bathroom and listen to michael jackson or the popular songs of that time. to answer your question, there are a few people, two women, actually three. my mother was an incredible influence. i have told the story a lot, but it is an important one. i remember the first day of kindergarten. i am one of three in my family. i was probably the one most
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socially uncomfortable and most attached to my mother. and remember the first day clutching her skirt and not wanting to be left in a strange place with people i did not know. i remained like that until they started playing music. they took a softer music class. there was a woman thought was an angel. she had the most beautiful voice. i thought, i like this. from kindergarten through sixth grade, it was the course i was looking forward to at school. she noticed that and would sometimes give me a measure to sing. when i left that elementary school to go to junior high school, she became the music
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director at this jr. high school. she got me involved in all city chorus. she would come on saturdays and pick me up and take me to rehearsals. she would stayed with me during rehearsals and bring me back home. it explodes my heart every time i think about this woman. when i left for high school, i ran into her in the hallway. she asked where i was going to her school. she said there was the duke ellington school of performing arts. i think you should audition. she got the application. together we filled it out. i had never heard of it before. she became the principal of the high school. she was very instrumental in terms of setting me on this course and guiding me into a
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situation where our would flourish and find my place and purpose. while i was there, one day i was late getting to class. i ran into a girlfriend in the hallway. she said i just heard something you have to listen to. i said i was late and had to get to class. she found a recording of puccini. we went into the practice room and listened all day. we did not eat or go to the bathroom. we would listen to the problem -- we would listen to the album to the end and then play it again. i knew nothing about it. i had never heard classical music in my life. i had never heard of. . -- i had never heard opera
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before. this woman had an unusual name. i do not know how my girlfriend found the album. there was this incredible opening. i have had that experience a couple of times in my life. there was an incredible knowing that rang true in my being that this is what you are supposed to do. i had not taken voice lessons yet. but i was so moved. she changed my life up moment hearing the unbelievably gorgeous voice and music from a woman that looked like me. it was this art form i had never heard of before. i said, she sings and you see the face of god. there was this incredible new awareness as if she gave birth
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to who i was later to become. hearing this woman, thinking i do not know what this is, but i would love to be a part of this. >> you have taken on a roll now of mentoring young women who want to study music. >> i say i was drafted because it sounds as if it was involuntary, but it is a great pleasure of mind. it naturally occurred as did finding myself in this arena in having this incredible awakening and education. since i left the duke ellington school, i have often gone back to give master classes and work with young singers. my agency would often scheduled
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concert with master classes. again known in the industry has teaching younger -- i get known in the industry as teaching younger students. we have a number of to the -- we have a number of tickets we give away or offer at a discounted price. i remember when i was a student and saw my first opera. it was because the kennedy center and extended a certain amount of tickets for students to come. i realized there is a tremendous responsibility. it is also a pleasure to want to share this gorgeous art form with people and young people in particular. i know the impact and difference it made in my life have been
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known at 13 this is what i wanted to do. it gave me a direction and purpose. i never suffered under pressure of my desire to keep up with the latest. when i would go to a voice lesson or concert, there was no synthetic that could provide me with that kind of incredible elation. to this day, i could be having the worst day. everyone has the experience. you hear a song on the radio and it transforms you. >> then you find people watching you singing in the car. [laughter] both of you are incredibly accomplished and well-known. for people who do not know, it may look like you figured out at 13 you wanted to be an opera singer. you decided you wanted to run a company. it just happened. both of you have had tough
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moments in your career. susan, at one point, you got fired and were not expecting it. talk about what lessons you learned from that, how you dealt with it. >> i always felt i had a blessed life for several decades. i went from job to job. i was good at seeing an opportunity and grabbing hold of it. i started a magazine because i stayed in touch with the publisher of the "village voice" where i had been managing editor. he became the head of murdoch magazines. i had this idea about a magazine for movies soon after the vcr
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came into existence. it was a transformative moment. until then, you have to go out to see a movie at the theater or you have to watch whatever movie was on television that we. it was not really an audience that new directors and producers and thought about film as more than brief entertainment. it was an i set up a lunch with him and he said he would back me. i had several jobs at disney that were great. ultimately, i was tapped to be the president of entertainment which meant that i was running prime-time. it was a tough time for disney. they were under pressure from
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shareholders largely because bbc was underperforming. we were the fourth among four at the time. although i had a few semi- successes in my first year, we still were in fourth place and we were not looking like we were going to get out of it. my boss at the time was let go and i was told i was going to get more responsibility. two weeks later, out of the blue, i was told i was being replaced. "for the first time in my life i had a very public firing and i was on the front page of every business section of every newspaper so there was nowhere to run and hide. they wanted to do it one of those where i had decided to leave and pursue other
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opportunities. i said we should just be honest about what happened. you are replacing me. after a week of wanted to crawl into a whole, i thought, this is an opportunity. i have always listened to what people were going to offer me and i really have not stepped back and thought about what i wanted to do enough. i have a chance to do that. i took the summer of and i got to do with a lot of things i had not done ever. i walked all of central park. i spent a lot of time doing puzzles with my daughters. it was a lazy, fabulous summer. i talk to a lot of people that i did not know but they were people that i admired and asked if i could get half an hour with them. she would be really surprised how many people said yes.
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i would just ask them for advice, what they would see happening in the world of media. what it led to ultimately was a job as ceo at the martha stewart co. in a transitional moment because she was going off to prison. [laughter] definitely a moment of change. i believe in that brand. i had gotten off of the board of directors about four months earlier and what had struck me was while advertisers fled because she had been convicted, her customers did not. they were very loyal. a lot of us felt she had gotten a raw deal. i thought there is opportunity for us to rebuild if she had gotten this behind her. i spent four years there in a
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wonderful moment for the company. and then another chance meeting let me over. >> would give the district cannot crawl in a whole are after the public firing? >> i could not afford to retire. that is always a good motivator. i had two daughters, two stepdaughters with college in front of them, one of them going to law school, so i know i have a lot of expenses going forward and i'm not someone who can sit at home for a long time. there were lots of things driving me. it was an interesting experience for me because i had to be honest about it.
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a lot of times we try to cover over the problems we have had and in this case, i just could not do it. that was a nice moment. the other thing that i will say gave me confidence is when the shows i had developed for that coming season and i was let go two weeks before the up front, on the schedule was desperate house wives -- "desperate hous ewives," "lost," and "grey's anatomy." >> back to denyce. i did not know what this takes on the vocal cords. you vibrate. conversational speech is around 120 hz. for a mezzo-soprano, is
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somewhere around 700 hz. there was a time when you lost your voice for about four months? i loved reading this that you hung a pad around your neck to communicate . you would write down curse words to your husband. or someone whose career depends on their voice, that must have been a terrified moment. you ended up having vocal surgery but you did not tell anyone. can you talk about how this was an incredibly stressful moment? you had some real ups and downs. kenya talk about how you got through that? >> the moment you are speaking about is the second time. when you posed the question, i knew there were two instances,
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so which do is speak about? there were several. the first one happened when i was doing my graduate work and i just won the metropolitan opera auditions. in that time i won the regional audition before going on to new york to compete in nationals, i lost my voice. "i say i lost my voice, that is the end of it. when he was running the mets in the arts program, he had been a big champion of mine. i came to new york to do something with his company and he said, this is not your voice . what happened. finally, he was able to diagnose that i had an imbalance in the thyroid. i'm still on medication for that to this day. they said i was going to have to stop singing for a time.
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if there is something wrong, they protect the vocal cords which means the more that i use the vocal cords, the more damage that they sustain. i stopped singing. i stopped and it took a job at a hospital and it was very interesting. >> those were some lucky patients. >> maybe. and i tell you what i was doing, i'm not sure. very good friends with him and he is one of my biggest fans. i had to stop singing. i was sent home from the metropolitan opera during national's and i had to go back to boston with my tail between my legs and i had to explain what happened. why did i would drop from the
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competition? i finally had my very first contract and i had to canceling. peter who was then running the company at that time remains loyal. i began working at this hospital and i worked replacing a woman. they said to me, there were three girls in the office and they said, what ever you do, don't go in his office because he can be quite honoree. i could not wait to get in his office. the troopers day i went in and i saw he had all these posters of the metropolitan opera -- salome, la boeheme. i said, i am sort of an opera singer. >> where you hear? what are you doing here? anyhow, i worked for him for about six or seven months and then i got a call from another
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young arts program who said they got my name from pedro russell and they wanted to know i would come down and audition. i said, thank you, but i'm no longer your singing. days said they were just checking in because the name kept coming up. they call the third time. i was on the phone with a friend of mine and maybe a year had passed. i said, can you believe this? he said, you're crazy. every single would die to have an opera company called them. at that point, i had not sung in over one year and i had no idea what was going to come out. i told a woman on the phone, let me think about it and call you back. that night, i had a dream. i had a dream i had gone into the doctor's office and have them look into my vocal folds.
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i started to sing in people from the waiting room came in to the room, what a lovely voice. i call the next morning and i said i was coming. when i started down saying that i feel as if it is a profession that has chosen me, there were a few times when i threw my hands up in the air and they said, we are not done with you yet. i went and did the audition for the houston grand opera and the offer me a contract right away. from that moment forward, everything changed. was that same moment of hearing that recording when everything changed down that moment of thinking that it was all over. my friends said to me during this silence, don't you miss singing? isn't it terrible for you? i would good concert tour sees all my colleagues and it would
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be hard. i was always fine. i say that with the utmost honesty. i always thought, if this is what i'm supposed to do, fortunately i come from this incredible group. i come from this incredible, strong lineage of incredible matriarchs, these women who does have to soldier on in spite of everything in my note mother had her work to cutout for her. >> she sounds like an early tiger mom. you guys have dinner ready on the table and one of the children would present oral
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reports. thursday's was music might when you would perform gospel and popular music was banned in the house. you said, she did not want her babies to be walking the streets. "she was terribly conscious of the amount of free time. there is my brother, he helps me with a lot of events. my mother was extremely strict and she designated each night of the week for something. monday night was selling. dr. we finished our homework, she did not want us outside and she taught us how to sew, my brothers also. we would repair the holes in our genes, make it close for our dollar babies, whatever. thursday night was music and i and my brother who has a gorgeous voice. had he the interest, i think he could have had a very good
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career. he sang all of these solos. we will present these songs on saturday. she says, it's a shame that nobody hears this but me, maybe we should single out in church on sunday. that was another layer. >> my children would be cross side i told them they would have to do that. >> as mothers, did you apply these lessons to your children? >> of the work in progress. [laughter] >> now i feel better. women in the workplace has an effect on how we run things. you have cedric tendency was to always be really nice with your requests and profits would ever critique you had with, my critique is not always right. can you talk a little bit about that?
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>> i still think that people perform better if what you're giving them is not just the bad. i still start with something they are doing well so that they can hear what follows. what i know from my own experiences that people shut down when someone comes in and has a strong critique about something that i've done, i would close down. i would think of all of the reasons why this was not the case, why it happened that way. if i start with something they have done well and move it to that, they hear it much better. because the comet was part of a larger conversation about being
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nice, i think a lot of women of my generation in the workforce went one of two ways. they either emulated the female bosses they had and were incredibly tough or they wanted to be very helpful. i was a great two for a long time. i pellett my job was to give great idea is to my boss and support whatever the program was and so that nice thing really developed over time. >> you have to learn how to give direction as a ceo. absolutely. i think that is sometimes hard. >> one more question and then i want to open it up to the audience. dr. jackson was on an earlier panel and she raised an
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interesting topic that i do not hear a lot about. she said she thinks a lot of men are intimidated by strong women. i know you met your husband on a plane with your daughter. your husband was a glamorous journalist. are there is a unique men that can deal with the women who are successful and as strong as you have to be to get where you are? >> i think it is very real and i think, more often than not, that is the case. i think i remember having a conversation with my mother when i was in college and i said, this home ice. isn't working out for me. -- this whole nice thing isn't working out. [laughter] little girls are grown. >> what did you mean by that?
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how was about working out? >> i always gave permission and allowed everyone else and supported whatever was presented by someone else. for me, there is an added layer and that is a whole other thing that comes into play. >> you don't want to be overly difficult. exactly. and being an opera singer, there is doubt. i think what it did was that i developed a muscle that kept down my own power and my own strength and it has not been until these last few years that i have really been able to be
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who i really am and to say without feeling badly or apologizing that something is not ok. i would say it was not something that was natural. i had learned from the way that i had been raised that it was easier and more comfortable to constantly sit back. in my profession, there is such incredible egos. >> that's not hard to believe. >> conductors, directors. and you have to learn how to be diplomatic but with some of these inflated egos, it is really a game to learn how to finesse that situation. >> absolutely.
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>> my spending so many years allowing everything, it does not bother me at all. >> do tried to teach your daughter that lesson? >> she is a real spitfire. she was a really different creature that showed up in our lives. there are times that i want to say to her no. but there's another part that and joy is allowing her to be assertive and letting her feel that she owns everything and it is always at her command. i know we have to temper that. >> but not too much. >> i relish in the fact that she naturally has this innate feeling that whatever it is i want to do, i can. >> i wanted to take some questions from the audience. way back there.
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can you just say your name and where you're from? >> i'm a freshman at eastern high school. i have a question about [no audio] >> how you motivate someone? >> a that motivated that -- is that directed at me? >> how would you motivated child to pursue their dreams? >> . speaking of yourself? >> there are really, but i have a cousin who has a daughter, so i was wondering if you could talk about how to help my grandmother or somebody motivate
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her. >> the first thing that is easily accessible for this young person is, first of all, to sing. just sing. she already has the instrument with her, so we are fortunate in that way. find an organization, a church, a community choir to involve herself in and to surround herself in a community that supports whenever her passions are. first of all, find those different outlets that are available and they are everywhere. where she can just saying and start to begin to experience that part of who she is an get encouragement in that way so that it can continue to feed her desire and this feeling she has in sight of her that wants to sing. that is the first thing that i
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would say. i don't know the specifics of this particular situation, but i think it's important to find a wonderful nourishing ground where you can do that. i is to sing with a hair brush in front of the mirror, you know? you could certainly do that with community organizations, churches, choral groups. >> what would you say, susan? >> my youngest daughter, she was left-handed and she wrote everything upside down, backwards. we were convinced that she would never learn to read. there were just no way she was going to learn to read the way she was being taught. one thing i knew that was really important was to keep her a
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confident person. figuring out what she was good at, a very well-developed social skills from the time she was a tiny person, and we reinforced that a lot during those years when she had worked harder than anyone else but a major she was able to express that part of her being where she excelled. plots and lots of hard work paid off. -- lots and lots paid off. >> another question from the audience? >> i commend the two of you so much and i direct this to susan as a woman in business. i read some comments the other
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day in a newspaper and you said something to the effect of that there is a special thing inherent in women to help other women. in terms of education, i have a b.a. from harvard and this is what america's all about, but i find it mind-boggling that only a select few are given the chance. sometimes, there are a whole lot of us who can give back to this great country for the whole world. >> what is your question? >> what is your recommendation for those who have what it takes but who do not get the opportunity? i'm sure you're lucky, but i'm sure a lot of people helped you. thank you for this discussion.
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>> i spend 20%-25% of my time meeting with women and try to help them make decisions about their own careers and how they can either start a business or moved ahead in some job they are in. i think all of us have a responsibility to do that out for this next generation of women were coming along. if your question is how do you, as a woman, find mentors and find sponsors, i think one thing you do is exactly what you're doing here, coming to conferences, meetings, and see if you can make connections with other women who are either in the same field or who you think
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may be able to give you good advice at some point. >> use it when you were at that point in your career try to figure out that next. in your career, you were surprised by how many people said yes to give you 30 minutes of their time. it takes courage to do that, but most people want help, men and women. that is something people out there can do. tried to get 10 minutes with somebody. >> absolutely. one thing that strikes me about this next generation, the millennial is is that they're much more comfortable asking for help than we were. i take it harder for you to think about raising your hand or picking up the phone and say, this is what i do, this is what i am, i have read this they have written, and i would love to find a way to spend 30 minutes with you. i will come to where ever you
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are. i have some questions that i think he may be able to give me some insight into. i'm promised you will be surprised by the people who say yes. there will be people who say no, but you cannot let that stop you. that's another thing we have to get past. the idea that if one or two say no and you just give up. >> we are out of time. i want to finish with one question for both of you. you ever get any completely free time to yourself, what is your one indulgence if you have an hour or a week and it to yourself? >> sleep. [laughter] >> not me. obsessivead or i'm an
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magazine junkie. i spend a lot of time on pinterest. i play scrabble and words with friends. if i have free time, i spend it doing funny things. >> thank you, denyce and susan. >> great to meet you. >> thanks, guys. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> michelle kwan and jaime herrera beutler also spoke at the washington post conference. we will hear the global public policy for facebook. >> welcome back. we have our final discussion this morning of the women's leadership forum and i want to introduce our next amazing panel. i will start here with jaime herrera beutler, elected to
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congress in 2010 representing southwest washington state's third district. she just turned 34 and she is the youngest woman currently serving in congress. welcome, jaime. [applause] next to her, the former chief of staff at the white house national economic council, the former chief of staff for larry summers at harvard university and currently the vice-president of global public policy for this company may have heard of -- facebook. next to me is michelle kwan, the most decorated figure skater in u.s. history. we all remember watching you at the olympics. i can still remember some of the routine. she also has another cool job now appear in you -- job now.
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she works in the u.s. department of state. i guess i just want to start out and talk about how you rise to the top. what are the hard parts? >> i would not say i'm at the top just yet. we are waiting for bacthat. maybe someone in the back or watching this will go all the way. >> when do you think we're going to have a woman president? >> ee in our lifetime. out be very surprised if we did not see it. we have seen serious women contenders. i think we will have a good shot. >> of work in politics even in
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working for other politicians. is it different? >> my husband is an awesome guy. they do spouse b benz. he's a little younger than i am. he went -- they do spouse events. there are all of these ladies with the hair and jewels. and he's a 29 year old man. there are a few other male spouses. i want to get a room in the capitol to make it a man cave. no offense, honey, but the entire capitol is a man cave. [laughter] that has been my experience. >> are there special challenges
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for women running for office? >> i think so. the easter really coax women into running and hold their hand. i disagree with about. -- dthey used to really coax women into running. i'm tied with 5 others for the youngest elected, 31. i think it is harder and more family. when you are sitting in a debate and people are hitting below the belt or the crowd shots you down to when you cannot speak. you just have to smile and not give them a youtube answer. >> what do try to avoid? >> my press guy right now is probably getting a little nervous, i'm sure. just reacting in a way that is our professional. it's very hard. one thing we want from our
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leaders is to see their humanity and to see them vulnerable and real. on the other hand, in this 24- hour news cycle, i have had trackers. in my first race, it killed me. i started to put a little bit of weight on. the air. that they use, i swear it they use a wide-angle lens. it was back side and it was huge. literally, below the belt. it was frustrating. i knew it was true and i went into this office and a ton of people there really this big public office. isn't that all turned around and said, your the one with the larger backside. and i said, yes. >> like a jennifer lopez type of thing? >> i thought to myself that i would say that.
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>> you're very beautiful, by the way. >> a lot of my male colleagues probably had to go through that same attack when you are running, but it's just different. "there are some questions coming in off of twitter. how how is technology break down gender barriers in business and in what you do? >> i think technology has really broken down the barriers between the different aspects of your life, home, a worker, and provided its flexibility we did not have before. i think women who made be trying to juggle, and men also, different aspects of their life like kids and interests outside of work, their job, working odd
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hours, a technology afford that kind of flexibility. the other thing is that technology companies in themselves are very fast paced and a lot of them are growing very quickly. when you find places that are moving quickly and are high- growth, there's a lot of opportunity that comes along with that. i think women do quite well in those types of environments. technology helps both allowing people to handle different aspects of their lives but it can be a great environment to have a fulfilling career. >> you have worked with a very interesting, strong man. what is that like? any tips? >> larry summers, mark zuckerberg, at the white house. it's very interesting all these
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big guys want you to run their staff. how you handle them? -- how do you handle them? >> the common thread in a lot of the relationships with strong man is a kind of openness. by having that openness, you develop a real, trusting relationship. this is both with women and men, but i think one of the unique features of mark zuckerberg, he basically live the mission of the company, give people the power to connect and share to make the world more open, and he lives by that. he sits in the middle of our campus and his conference room is a glass box. >> does he come in every day? >> every day. he rarely travels. you cannot get him out with
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anyone else, but he is just sitting there living the mission. >> what is he doing? >> if you ask him what drives him, he would say building things. he really enjoys building of things. when he started facebook, he was looking to start a service to tap into something that is fundamental to every human being, this desire to connect and be social. that is really what facebook is about and has been. with larry summers, too, he is very authentic and a very open person. he taught me a lot about that and why it is helpful in an organization. it builds trust and it helps a deepened people's understanding about what they're doing and why they are doing.
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>> you have had an impressive career for someone so young. >> thank you for saying that. >> harvard, the white house, facebook. what is your vision about what is next? how do you pick? >> i read something recently there resonated with me about how i made my decision along the way. i definitely have not had a linear path. i had more of a kind of house where i meandered with a sense of purpose. >> i like that. >> that was not me. i read something and i think i added my own flourish, but meandering with a sense of purpose. it is about being true to your convictions and your passions, but also leaving yourself open to opportunities when they come along. i will give you two little stories.
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when i went to college, i went in 1988, and most people were probably trying to figure out how they were going to decorate their room, what causes they're going to take. my big preoccupation was hard to get my absentee ballot so i could vote in ohio or michael dukakis at the time. i had one poster on my wall, michael dukakis. in 1992 when i was about to graduate, a lot of my friends were going through corporate recruiting. it's a really great thing because you go in the fall, get your job offer in november- december and then you sit back and enjoy. >> this was at harvard? >> this was undergrad at miami of ohio. i also started going after
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corporate recruiting, but the whole time i had this sort of gnawing feeling and i thought it was normal anxiety from interviewing. what i realized sitting in a second round interview with this company was it was that i was not listening to my passion nor my convictions. what had been tippling in the back of my head was that i was fascinated by high old -- how the 1992 presidential campaign was unfolding and i really wanted to go work on it. i sat in that interview and i explained to the interviewer that i was going to need to withdraw from the process. i walked out, went home, and i was terrified. i called my parents to said, "you did what?" not a textbook start to a career, but when i realized was that my focus was very clear and i needed to do the thing which
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was most passionate which would be to get involved in government. leaving yourself open and following your conviction is part of the way you make decisions. >> and listening to your stomach. when something doesn't sit right. there are so many who start out to be architect tim go back to be doctors or whatever. everyone seems to say it, do what you are passionate about. how do you know? sometimes you get a good job offer. >> all i know was that i was meandering what purpose. >> the last six years of my life as i transition out of sports, i was a champion and i said, ok is my champion -- is my life always going to be on the
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ice? i have had the incredible opportunity to be on tour with the champions on ice or whatever, an exhibition, appearances, and i have had to say no. it was everything that i knew. just like you had said, you have to meander with purpose. i said, this is what i need to do. i need to get an education. i want to challenge myself. >> , the talk about what you did as a teenager. can you talk about the training and hours, a typical day? what was your school like? then a lot to talk about how that change you. >> i look back at my time on the ice and the way i was training, i was invincible in some ways.
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i did not enjoy taking a day off because i felt like i was losing time. but competitors in china are, rush show were trading on a daily basis. -- my competitors in china and russia work training. this is a position of irritation of a triple jump. i was like a robot in the sense that everything i was doing, the hours i was putting in it, the morning, the afternoon, the evening, i trained all they basically. my first session, 10:00, i was basically of the rank by nine and my last session would be at 6:00-6:30. then i would go to the gym. i look back, no wonder i was in really good shape. >> where did that drive?
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how did that drive? where do you get that drive? >> we were talking earlier about the role of parents. when you had mentioned the tiger mom or the tiger parents, we did not have tiger parents. they were there to support me and be there in times when i needed a push culminated motivation. it is just one of those things when you have a passion and a vision. you do not see anything else. that is what drives you every day. >> you just got engaged. are you going to be a tiger mom. [laughter] >> looking at the way i was raised with a set of rules and just the way my parents were able to give me so many
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incredible opportunities, the way they raised me was that you had to earn it. they were able to educate in a way, for example, in skating, it costs a lot of money to pay for ice time. it is $10 an hour, coaching, choreography, costumes, the skates. my dad when they said, i will give you $20 -- to a 10 year- old, that can go a long way. $20? my dad worked almost 24-7 so i better make the best use of it. that is where that discipline kicks in. i was always a first one on the ice, last one off. i made the best use of it. >> it's interesting that you say that. a different experience,
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obviously, but i remember my parents did not have a time. they help where they could with college. i remember having a conversation with my dad saying, recognize the value here and i will make it worth it. that resonates with me just because i think it's true. you have to want it. abraham lincoln said, i will prepare, my time will come. are the one hand, you are presuming what is of interest to you, but you have to knock on a lot of doors because you did not know which one will open. about happiness and satisfaction. you can give her one of those. is anyone satisfied? everyone is successful. >> satisfied? completely satisfied. >> where do you find satisfaction?
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>> people ask me if i like being in congress. i say it is not to like or not like, it is rewarding. a lot of it is just pushing. i cannot imagine you enjoy sleeping like this or lifting weights, but it is something that you do, the reward of knowing you were filling part of your purpose. >> the satisfaction that you are doing what you are meant to do and some how it adds to the greater good. >> absolutely. >> where do you get satisfaction in your day? >> i get satisfaction and pride of many different parts of my day. i love waking up in my home, being with my children, my husband. >> how old are your children? >> 7 and four, two boys. 3 if you include my husband. [laughter]
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i get satisfaction out of my work. i really love working. i said it. i love working. it really grounds me. i like helping people. when i originally went into government early in my career, it is because i was interested in finding ways to help people by finding solutions to help people buy even just direct service helping people. what is amazing about facebook is we are able to use our platform to help. when people connect and share and you have this openness, you have the ability to influence other people. you could influence someone does by saying you are an organ donor. you could influence a friend to become one and it could mean the difference between life and death for someone. i get an enormous amount of satisfaction from work. i think in your work and when
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you're trying to juggle all of these things, one thing that is important is to make sure that you're really stretching yourself, pushing yourself. >> how do you remind yourself? >> i have a good friend and mentor who is on the white house national economic council with me. when i was offered the job at facebook, i went to her and said, i was offered the job. i just don't know if i should take it. she said, will tell me about it. i said the issues are interesting but i'm not sure i know that much about it. lots of travel. i will be away from the kids. i don't know. the headquarters are in california. my family is here. the one she seized on was that
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it just seems like a big job and i don't know if i know how to do it. she said, you are intimidated. that is good. be daunted. you want to feel daunted by your job. that means it's right for you. i listened to her and i took that job. even when i am in the job and i will sort of say, i kind of master this part of it, but now i'm going to take on this and that, you reach for your next thing so that it continues to feel vaunting and therefore fulfilling. let's face it. if you're not going to leave and doing these other things, then what you are involved in should be the billing. >> daunting. michelle, the world of sports has been male-dominated. you have been loaded one of the most important sportspeople in
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american history. there is all this sports jargon. what did you learn from sports that maybe guys have known for a longer time? >> there are a lot more women in sports now. there are a lot of things i've learned and can apply on a daily basis. hard work, dedication, disciplined, facing challenges head on and not being afraid. those are thing is i will always apply to my life. as i face new challenges, meandering with purpose, it is finding about purpose in life, those lessons learned, and applying them. you mentioned being something in helping others as a sense of satisfaction.
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i find satisfaction in my daily life in saying, how can i make a difference? what can i do? i did this routine, this job, this span, but now it is like, the clock is ticking. how do you transition? how do you learn? how do you make a difference in public service or in connecting the world? >> where are your olympic medals? i'm just kind of curious. [laughter] >> when i was really young, i thought i would just keep them on. >> your earned them. >> they are in the ice rink that my family and i built in los angeles on display for everyone. and someone walked in to my house, you would not saee any
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member abelia. they are roughly metals. when i look back at all the big competition than the olympics, i do not look back at the metals i received. it is more the moment site experienced. >> we just got a note from the hill that they are going to a vote. sorry, jaime. >> getting to do the job because you're serving people. >> thank you so much. [applause] >> hopefully we have not seen the last of jaime herrera beutler, but i want to continue this. your models are on the ice rink. i love that they are in public. we have asked these people along with everyone here to tell us what they had done at 17.
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it's very interesting but you have already done this by 17. i thought it was fabulous, what you were saying, you can have more than one dream. can you talk a little bit about that? it's just not one thing. >> i think i would have to disagree with my dad in this way. he says you have to have tunnel vision. as an athlete, you do. you have to really focus on your dream. mine was to make it to the olympic games. i slept the olympics, i ate the olympics. i trained like it was my goal. now, you can have many dreams in your life. one of my dreams is to have kids. i also wanted a career in public service. in a sense, i'm also reminding myself, my 32-year-old self -- >> you just got engaged.
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was it easy to find an appropriate die? >> he is awesome. we competed against each other. >> do tell. on the ice? >> he speaks trainees better than i do. it's just one of those things. you have a partner in life. >> he works for the national security agency? how do you compete? >> we applied for the same fellow ship. >> the white house fellowship? >> yes. if anyone knows the process of the fellowship, you get selected into regionals, then finals, then national finals. i felt like i was competing for the olympics. there are 30 selected at the final and then a 30 incredible appointed by the presidents of missions and to have tom brokaw,
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four-bar general wesley clark, all these incredible people asking questions. >> he won? >> he won. i still think like an athlete, but they selected 15. my friends and family were like, you competed against him? he won it? you were still talking to him? >> i did not give the fellowship, but i got the fella. [laughter] >> i loved what you were saying. the have a poster that says, what were you do if you were not afraid? you said that question, it is a game changer. >> it all over facebook, we have all of these posters that are very inspiring and they really
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and forman drive the culture. there are things like, perceived to be bold, think wrong, move fast and break things. >> what does it think wrong mean that? >> forget about convention. look at the white board and come up with something. if you do not like the way across swap works, change it. dixit, change it. do not think in conventional ways. -- fix it. change it. break the mold. follow whenever your vision is. take risks. .f you fail, it's ok what would you do if you're not afraid, it has become a personal mantra. i'm not sure i will always follow it perfectly, but if you just sit for a moment and think
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about most every decision that you make in your daily life, there is some aspect of fear and think about how much more you could get out of everything you do and how much more you could accomplish if you just followed your passion or conviction was. don't play it safe. sometimes you have the unexpected. i will throw in a little story in terms of career paths, but there was a moment in the clinton administration when it was ending and my plan for several years have been to go to business school. at the end, i applied to business school. i got in to harvard. i was planning to go there. i was excited about the great general management program. a few weeks later, a couple months later, larry summers, who
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i got to know at the treasury, was named president of harvard. he said, you are already moving to boston, why don't you be my chief of staff for the first year? it was intriguing, but it was not on the path. i was afraid of afraid of making decision. so, larry has this saying that people have lost presidential campaigns with your advisers them what i had in this one little decision. i called everybody i knew. i mean, everybody. no matter who you were. if you were walking down the street. i asked you what you thought about this decision. you want to go to a business school and a general management program -- why not learn in a large, complex, a decentralized university that is trying to
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change the face of education? so, that is what i did. when i went to business school, i knew more about what i wanted to learn and what i wanted to study. if i had let feeder -- >> when you had a decision like that, do you write down the pro and con and talk to people? it sounds like you are very methodical? >> i am methodical about it. i worked at the treasury department. i worked under secretary bob crippen, who is known for probabilistic thinking. he wrote about this in his book "and uncertain world," which is very good. how do you look at these lists? if you see things on both sides, how do you really know?
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looking at people, talking to other people, understanding these things, whether the decisions you are making are more expensive or narrowing? that is the way to think about some of these decisions. >> we will quickly up a couple of questions from the audience. do you still skate, by the way? >> i do not. >> when do you give it up? >> i was skating in los angeles for thanksgiving. >> so, you still skate, just not competitively? >> i see these will 10-year olds and i am like -- you know, -- >> you are not a big person, but you have to be so strong. how do you do that?
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>> working out a lot. my legs are actually -- now i do a lot of yoga and i am surprised. there is a muscle i had when i was skating, and it is three times your weight when you are coming down from a jump. >> right. >> another thing i wonder -- 1 1 million people are more art watching you on the ice and you fall, how do you get up? >> it is one of those things. you know that thousands of people are watching. the whole audience together those -- goes "aw!" you have to pick yourself up and go on like it did not happen. these are the lessons i learned. it is not going to be like "yay
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, life is so perfect!" no, it never works that way. i think it is one of those feelings -- >> if you train yourself to just keep going. >> yes. you plow through it and you pick yourself back up. >> a great lesson for anyone. >> hello, my name is joan. in the former president of antioch college. i wanted to talk about women and emotion. one of the big fears i had in my working life was the fear of crying. i do not know if anyone else had that fear. women cry when they are angry rather than yelling. women cry when they felt despair. in my life, i never learned how to cry or how to stop crying.
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it was a very big fear for me. since my husband died, nothing seems worth it. i do wonder, how do you deal with emotions? are you allowed in your careers to show a motion? the other part of that is -- i believe you can be rational while crying. there is this dichotomy that you are either emotional or rational. >> alright. >> i am very emotional thinking about it. in my skating career, i actually learned a lot by being emotion and performing, feeling the music, the moments, taking it all in. i was able to sort of express' that's. i think it made me a better skater. in the workplace -- i think that
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was the same thing. people think, you are thick skin, you are an athlete, you're able to deal with falling and getting up. i worked to have that six can and not put your emotions on your sleeve. >> would you tell people not to cry at work? >> no, i do not think -- i think it is unique in some respects, but i think a lot of places are changing in this regard. at work, it is just like facebook itself. we have a policy and we want you to act like your authentic self. at work, you use your name. it does not help to have a social networking service where you are using any more people cannot find you. -- using an name where people cannot find to.
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you have to ask like -- act like your best self. but there are different aspects of your personality. sometimes at work you do get angry or feel emotional or do cry. i think there is a time and place. our chief operating officer has said openly that she has cried in front of mark and mark said "would you like a hug?" >> he does not strike me as a huggy guy. >> she says that because she wants people to feel permission to express themselves at work. at one point, i remember being in a job and feeling really frustrated about something, and my boss said to me, do you want to talk about this? i can see that you are upset. i said, i do. give me five minutes.
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i want to walk outside. then we can have a discussion, our rational discussion about what was upsetting me in what i did not agree. >> and that is your better self? >> you're better sell. >> good question. one more question from the audience. >> hello. my name is kelly. i am with the speakers group. i have been out of school for eight years. i am getting my mba at night. it is a boys' club, as much as they say it is not. what tips do you love for negotiating that? -- how for negotiating that? i will see them go to lunch, talked-about x plan b. in into sports, but some things that they talk about, -- i am into sports, but some things that they talk about, i am not
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into. i feel like i am at a disadvantage sometimes. >> that is a great question. hopefully you are doing all the things that you talk about because you like them as opposed to being a means to another and, because i think that comes through. i do not know the particulars of your situation, but i would just say, look around. there may be other kinds of ways you can develop a relationship that is not over sports. maybe there is some project where it is a kind of an intense project and so by working together on it you get to know people better and they see your work in a different way. so, i think experimenting with how to change the nature of certain relationships at work -- it is hard work. but i think there are ways to do it. >> and we have a twitter question from -- for michelle. what was the hardest thing
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about being in the olympics, been a champion, and what other advice do you have for people who want to be number one in the world? >> when people say i want to be the best, i want to be number one, having that vision is a good thing. but i think it is about improving one's self. when people say, oh, you must have looked at other competitors and been like "i want to be your." no, i never really thought that way. call me crazy. i was like, i want to perform. >> tonya harding? >> i competed against her in 1984 -- 1994. it was just that mentality about being the best that you could be. makes small improvements. gradual process, working on the
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small details. >> it is not about beating them, but improving yourself? >> yes. is about improving your performance. people say, i think about the job interview and it is so competitive. the job interview is just as competitive as figure skating. you have four minutes on the ice. you have the attention of nine judges looking at you. make the best of it. you are not competing against anyone else. these are your four minutes. own it. >> the pressure -- is it the ninth part, not the physical part? >> i think it is preparing four years for this one moment and is saying, i ate well, i slept. i did not go out to parties. this is my four minutes. this is my 16 minutes.
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this is my four minutes. it is nerve wracking. i think that mentality of what i had and what i just said has made me too nervous. i should have approached it like, hey, give it your best shot and see what happens. and in that kind of frame, mind frame, if you go into the meeting and are like "i have got to get it right, i have got to get it right" that is not the best way to approach things. say, well, i am prepared. i trained hours and hours. now let's see. let's go out and have fun. that mentality is very difficult. say, i did all my hard work. let's go out there and enjoy. >> the perfect way to end a great day. thank you so much. thank you, everybody.
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[applause] we hope to do this again next year. thank you. this has been a fantastic discussion. please send your e-mail comments and questions and i will be writing up the highlights of today on washingtonpost.com. thank you so much. [captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2012] >> the issue is not whether halper will be stigmatized. we know that he is. the question is, the times will the government push him because of that moral condemnation. >> starting monday and throughout christmas week, c-
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span is featuring a oral arguments by current supreme court justices before they were on the bench. you can listen on xm satellite radio channel 119 or online at c-span.org. >> c-span recently spoke with two retiring lawmakers. mr. burton, an indiana republican, served in congress for 13 years and you're the oversight committee. senator conrad has been in office for 20 years and chairs the budget committee. our interview with senator burton is at 8:00 and with senator conrad at 8:30. >> the only people who knew for certain of its existence for my
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father, his secretary, and the secret service agent who install the. that is before president nixon made presidential taping infamous. against the backdrop of watergate, the concept of secret taping can seem problematic, but it is beyond doubt this is a unique and invaluable historical restores. on the states, history unfolds in real time in the most -- we can hear the life and death discussions during the cuban missile crisis. >> caroline kennedy on the 1962 recordings of the late president. that is at on c-span2. >> aerospace engineer burt rutan spoke in jacksonville,
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fla. at the world affairs council. he compared today's space program to the early days of space travel. this is about an hour and 20 minutes. >> i am going to talk about meanly two things. there is inspiration. inspiration for our kids so they can be innovative. and i am going to talk a lot about manned space flight. we are on the space coast, i guess, right? we will talk quite a bit about the history of manned space flight. pretty much that. i really welcome your questions when i am done. my first job out of college was a government job. i worked for the air force. flight testing airplanes during the vietnam war. i did that for seven years. it was a wonderful thing for future airplane designer to do, and that is test brand new airplanes on their initial
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flights. after that, i became an entrepreneur. i was not involved in the manned space flight of the 1960's. i was an observer and i did my own thing with airplanes. i founded two companies and ran them for -- well, the one i just retire from for 30 years, and -- retired from for 30 years, and i basically stayed in the high desert until about a year ago. throughout my career building and running my companies, i never had a title on my business card. it was never ceo. it was always burt rutan. i never thought about managing. i was an engineer with a passion to try a lot of new stuff and i have a lot of energy.
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i hired people because i could not do myself what i wanted to do, and so i had employee's. and i respected the work that they did because i gave them good salaries and the very best dental and health insurance, better than lockheed. and i never thought that i was there to grow a business or to make a profit. in fact, the number one thing -- and i always said that even to those who held stock in my company -- the number one thing, the biggest priority for my employees was to have fun. i enjoyed the accomplishment of breakthroughs and the fun of a first applied. and everyone who worked for me deserved to have that enjoyment. the second priority was the
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families of the employees have fun. that is why we provided good salaries and good health care and so on. the third priority, no cutting to make a profit. it is tough to say that to a stockholder or a board member. but every company i have ever seen go bankrupt, they started having fun -- they stop having fun before that. when people have fun, they will work like. that was my justification. now, driving up to north idaho, i went up to the desert and put myself way up on a big beautiful lake. i wanted a completely different view. i was thinking, it was a long drive, 20 hours on the road. i was thinking, where did i want to do when i retire? and something jumped out at me that never surfaced before.
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it was not the 46 air plants. it was not solving problems with the f-4 in the air force. something jumped out at me. i thought, back there in mojave are 400 employees and their families and everyone of them pay taxes. you know, only half the people in the country paid taxes. every one of those people play it -- pay taxes. they would not have been there. that relieves the burden on all the other taxpayers. the government job burdens the other taxpayers. to me, that kind of struck me as something as a significant personal accomplishment. i never realized or even thought about that until after i retired. ok, let me find the clicker and
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we will get going. let's try the button. ok. we are going to talk about manned space flight. the first flight we are going to talk about is that wonderful first nine years, at eight years really. the boss docked, upper left -- this chart shows every one of the launch systems developed in the world during that short time. there are nine launch systems designed and flown during that time. bostok, the red stone, the atl as, the x-15, then gemini, the system, the russian soyuz.
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and my favorite -- the lunar lander. it is great to have a large system where you do not need a ground crew on the ground to launch them. somebody told me they could not lift it, but if it was in the gas, it could lift it. that is probably not true. [laughter] interesting thing -- seven of these nine were done by nasa. and every one of the seven were flown without accidents. they never entered an astronaut on a space flight. that is quite an accomplishment -- they never injured and astronauts on a . that is quite an accomplishment. let's look at the next 42 years, but the lunar landing until now. i have put up here five systems.
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there is really only three that have flown, and new systems that have flown people to space within 42 years. there is the space shuttle. there is the chinese shenzhou and spaceshipone. only three in 42 years. the ones on the bottom -- those will probably fly people into space at the next few years. spaceshiptwo. the richard branson program company is still working on. and of course, the dragon. kind of a short list for the next 42 years. how many in this audience were born before 1935? great. you know, the last audience i talked to a few weeks ago, there was not one person who raised
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his hand. [laughter] you who raised your hand are members of an extremely important group, because no one born after 1935 has walked on another world. and you know the crazy thing about it? there are actuary tables that show the right side of the chart. we may be within 10 years of having nobody alive on the earth that has gone to another world. isn't that a bizarre thoughts? or if there is anybody alive who has walked on another world, he speaks chinese. that is probably what will happen in the next 10, 15 years. if you had told me in the 1960's when during a three and a half year time period, america
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sent 20 people to the moon and 12 of them walked on the surface, that there would be a time in the future when it nobody had been to the moon, i would have said, oh, my god. a meteor must have hit the earth. how could that possibly happen? how could to generate this phenomenal capability and then forget about it? alan shepard through this little suborbital flight -- not unlike what we did with spaceshipone -- just three weeks after gagarin flew. if nasa had decided to fly 1 last monday, allen sheppard would have been the first astronauts -- one less monkey, allen sheppard would have been
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the first astronaut. and i am glad that they flew that monkey. isn't that weird? one monkey decision away from us even going to the moon. [laughter] 10 years, almost exactly 10 years after that, he was playing golf on the moon. hitting golf balls on the moon. what have you done in the last 10 years? [laughter] ok, let's look at the next 10 years. 1971 until 1981. you had skylab. by the way, skylab -- this is our first space station. not the isss. skylab was completed in four years after the early sadr
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implied. skylab has a much bigger room to float around in than anything at the international space station. see that picture floating around? you had to blow to get to a wall. the international space station, you are almost touching everywhere. that was a neat thing to have. we did the robots, two planets. excuse me -- we did. i mean the world did. these are not nasa accomplishments. by the way, the mission to go to the planets -- this includes those that were launched. not all of them were successful. but here is an average of 4.60 year -- 4.6 per year during that time of robotic planetary exploration. at the end of that time, exactly 10 years after the gulf on the
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moon, we have the first piloted space shuttle -- 10 years after the gulf on the moon, we have the first piloted space shuttle and more favorable access to space. now, in showing a slide that shows as three decades after that through 2011. 30 years. an average of two planetary missions per year. with robots. the shuttle, the mir, the russian soyuz, the international space station can only go where gagarin and glen went on their first lead. that is the only place we can go. isn't that kind of weird?
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the last 30 years. there were four manned space flights in 1961. actually, four for the first year. from the time that gagarin flew, there were four manned space flights. in 2004, there were four manned space flights. i did three of them with spaceshipone. isn't that kind of weird that that long after the capability happened, i had to come out with three or four dozen people in mojave and fly most of the space flights to get back to the first years flight rate? -- first year's flight rate? total nonsense. ok, i want to make an observation as we get into
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innovation. our technical courage and accomplishments motivates all age groups, but i think it is particularly important for youngsters. five years after the apollo moon landing, america was first in awarding engineering, math, science doctorates. first in the world. now we are 37th. where is the demand? there is nothing exciting going non-. our kids seem to get excited because there is a new iphone out. rather than we are going to the moon. i would like to talk a little bit about managers managing research companies. and manager, unless he himself is the creator, the technical
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mind, he overdoes -- excuse me, he does the wrong job. he should be out setting a goal only. he should also spend time raising the money peeping but he should not run the program. and this little quotation by a brilliant man -- if you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect would -- wood. well, it is you, the manager, who has selected the materials to make the product. if you give them tasks to do, then he has decided the manufacturing method. he thinks it is his responsibility as a manager because he is running the program, but what he will do is he will make a decision so that innovation cannot occur.
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and that is the main reason that companies that try to be innovative are not innovative. well, our technology leaders, the people who really inspired me, they were inspired by these wonderful things happening. i'm going to focus on a little period of time. as short as four years, maybe six or seven. is the time that oral rights -- is that time that orville wright and his brother took off. the world realized -- they did not do that with photoshop. since that first flight, the
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people who had taken a flight could sit in that first wrote and only three of you would have taken a turn. we did not even have the internet. can you imagine? going from that -- they were building 500 airplanes a year in france by then. in four years. and of course, the airplane was invented by natural selection. we did not help -- we did not know how to do with. the ones that did not tell the pilot, they are today's airplane. [laughter] i believe that kids were inspired by this wonderful short period of time. on the 100th anniversary of the wright brothers applied, at aviation week asked me and others to say what i thought about the first 100 years of aerospace. who were the movers and shakers. they wanted me to predict the
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next 100 years. i refused. i went ahead and i wrote an article and i picked these people and i was fortunate enough to have met all but two of these people. i think these were the ones that come to me, were the ones that really made aerospace in that first 100 years. if you do not know korlov, he was the van braun of russia. who was inspired by them -- i found out later and realized later that everyone on that list was between the age of 4 and 13. and seeing that innovation gives them the courage to try
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something really hard, and that is why they did the accomplishment. my first business was an aircraft factory and it worked primarily with the public, selling plans to people to build their own home built airplanes peiping -- airplanes. we did 15 airplanes and so plans for five of them. i think now, how the heck did i do that? 15 airplanes. what was the process from selling five of them? and i only sold paper, i only seoul plans. wow, i must have a lot of fun. the voyager was built on the profits from very easy plan signals. -- planned sales. they were based on fun, grass- roots find. the public interface.
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this is where we took the voyager to oshkosh. i think this is before the world flight. this was a milestone accomplishments. -- this was a milestone accomplishment. the interesting thing about it technically, if you have an ultimate record that is not weight class or propeller or whatever, but overall record, how to record, speed record -- usually when you be the old record, you beat it by at least 1% or they do not give it to you. but usually they are beat by a few percent. voyager in order to make it around the world, we had to fly more than twice as far than any other airplane had flown. we had to more than double an existing altman record. -- ultimate record. i am going to skip over the
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business aspects. skill composite's. i founded, before i stopped selling plans, i have a three- year time period where i had a company that would build a part and i would run back and forth. that is why i quit selling plans in 1985, by the way, for home developers. we did a couple of programs at rutan aircraft that did not involve the public. one of them was for nasa. another one of fort fairchild republic, a military trainer. this was a different kind of business. i decided to found a different kind of company for it, one that would not be burdened with a product liability impacts that public companies had. so, scale was formed in 1982. this is a chronology list of the
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projects we can talk about. the first one, the starship and the microlight were basically done at the same time. the world's largest airplane. this seems weird, but they are. i worked with them for more than 20 years with conceptual design , and it got funded after a retired. my old company -- it is not an old company, it is about 30 years. this is a staggering chronology of the timeline of the project. ok, why is there going to be finally and opportunity for the public to go into space? why now? spaceshipone for me was a
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personal goal. yes, it was funded by paul allen. he thought i should do it and he had a passion for space flight because of the apollo launch. [laughter] i think what gave me the inspiration and the courage to try something really it far out there -- i had never built an airplane that went faster than 27.6 mach numbers. by building spaceshipone, i told my shop we were going to build an airplane that was going to go as fast as an sr-71. mach 3.5 straight up. you can guess what they thought of me. [laughter] space, people using
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their own money, the new space investors -- allen, musk, bezos, the google guys -- every one of these guys was a little kid during apollo. coincidence? ok, let's move on to spaceshipone. i think paul wanted to do this for legacy. as it turns out, spaceshipone has been a profitable business for them. can you imagine an investor going out into the desert and having people do research where the actuaries, the insurance companies do that hole in one insurance, gave $10 million to paul? they said it could not be done.
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he went out and did that because of his curiosity. now, you would have thought that $20 million or so -- well, that is just pocket change if you have $126 billion, right? he got almost half his money back. richard branson gave him another couple million to put a virgin on it for two flights. he got half his money back right away. he has been licensing the technology for the tethered reentry and is still turning back on it. that is weird. can you imagine, at nasa doing space research and it is probable? -- profitable? no, you cannot imagine that. [laughter] you guys are from florida.
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you cannot imagine that. i put this in just because i think our astronauts are handsome. the balding one there is two or three years older then they will allow someone to fly an airplane, but he is a very good pilot. we had to build our own b-52. what i did was put every system, every system on the space ship, we put on the white nights. it is -- on the white knight. it is avionics. it is the environmental control system. that is the space ship cavan. qualified to go into space. every component of the space ship one that had any issues
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about the maturity is in that plane. spaceshipone is a very simple glider with a very throaty engine that runs for a minute. it is at supersonic for reentry. the reason it does is that mike adams got killed while i was working at edwards during reentry. he did not have the hitch accurate within about that much -- pitch accurate within about that much range and he did not have the yaw accurate within about that much rain, and that haunted me. i thought that was the reason we would not have commercial space flight. the pilot for spaceshipone reentry -- by the way, there is not autopilot. the only thing controlling those controls are the rudder pedals
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on a mock 0.3 airplane. you have the electric fin on the tail. just like a piper cub. [laughter] weird, huh? you could be at apogee in spaceshipone, eat your lunch, handoff, and do as a free entry -- safe reentry. you're not putting yourself at risk like mike adams put himself at risk. this is just a picture isgoogle earth. out to the right is the white knight climbing 50% more altitude than an airliner. going up about 50,000 feet. from up there, about 70 miles,
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you're looking on the horizon. this is why we stopped flying space ships. i wanted to fly one every five months to show reliability and cost for future space tourism. however, the historian at the smithsonian aerospace museum did something i thought he would not do until after people were buying tickets and flying in space. he defined spaceshipone -- the prototype. there was only one. he defined that article as an important historical artifacts. and if i gave it to them, he would display it right alongside the spirit of st. louis added the first airplane to break the sound barrier and all those that
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went to the moon. you know, all of these milestone airplanes. he would put it there and it would sit there forever. now, paul allen thought about this in this way and said, hey, i did this program for legacy. go fly it again. i reminded him, he could get almost half his money back with two or three more flights. so, we did that. well, is it possible to have public flying in space? i think it is the odd for norse in competition -- entrepreneurs in competition. there has never been any competition. they are applying the same thing that they flew garagin in, essentially. naca never build an airliner.
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nasa has build a space ship, but they have no competition. the belief that i can do it is the same thing, i believe, that a few of those guys in a hobby into a sub orbital space flight. i think this is something similar to the optics back in 2008. i can do that. and the courage to try risky concept. i think the research needs to be justified not by politics and science. when i say politics -- nasa, which works at the direction of the president, it gets its money from congress -- a lot of what they have done has really not been doing what the public thinks nasa ought to do.
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it is used as a political tool with russia and the mir program. and of course, now, there is nothing politically important about going to mars, but there are political things about muslim outreach and all of these things that nasa is doing right now. let's talk about science for a moment. i talked to a group of nasa at specialists, and ask them, why do we have a space station? and they said, oh, for science. i said, name the three most important science breakthroughs because of the space station? weird. [laughter] okay, let's talk a little bit about what richard branson is doing now.
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a new industry, public access sub orbital space. it is being done sub orbital because the problem has not been solved for it to be safe enough or affordable enough for you to go to work it. it is solvable, but it has not even been tried. nasa has not worked to reduce the cost of space flight or but. they developed the shuttle, put all their money in that for all these decades. the shuttle is more expensive to fly than throwing away the boosters. failed. it was supposed to be safer. statistically the shuttle is the most dangerous way to go to space. failed. that's weird. no, it's not. its government. [laughter]
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yes, richard branson is as wild and weird and -- he is just like to see on television. cool guy. i think the steps will be likely virgin galactic, someone else may be first. people need to be exposed to a large cavan. you cannot go in a cramped space ship and spender week in orbit. it has to be about the destination, your launch vehicle. and the windows have to be big. you really want to see. the goal and the plan now, there is a company producing space ships. they are supposed to build about 40 of them. and the goal is to fly about 100,000 people within 40 years after they get started.
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by the way, how many people of flown in space? anybody know that? in 50 years -- if that works, i think it will be very profitable, and if it is a very profitable, it will attract the kind of investment so we can do what we really should do in my lifetime, and that is the ability to go to a resort hotel for a couple of weeks. this is a few miles. that would be a cool ride. and your short excursion would take you around the moon and back. ok, i'm going to talk about lessons learned in my career. informal chats are more effective than formal meetings. i have always found that it be
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of a meeting with a lot people and you're sitting down, the meeting is not worthwhile. this is a chat at oshkosh. people want to understand about airplanes. they want to share stories about the airplane they are flying. i said, let's just have a chat. this happens every year for many years. everybody needs at that time every day, and we talk. -- meets at that time every day, and we talk. a couple of need pictures. this movie -- if you have not seen it, it really shows the human parts, the emotions. the interaction -- introduction dvd has some pieces of the. there is nothing stayed there. there was nothing in the script. everything in that movie is because these people were embedded and they were there for
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years and we did not even notice them. and they did get some neat stuff. and everything -- these are candid shots. here i am in the g-5. i am with the test pilot. we certainly do not agree. he said it up and i would say to the left. on the lower right, that one is a real significant. in most dangerous flight -- mike had to recover from a tail stall. this was a glide like, not a space flight. by the way, the guy on the left, he is now the ceo of scaled. you can see that the discussion -- we are really getting good data back and forth here. i mean, he is just about out of
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the space ship. and things that were said there are probably the most important things, more important than the final record of the flight. when i write my memoirs, which i think i will just published on my website, i will tell you what i am telling the faa administrator over in the corridor here. faa was the one that regulates these test flights. that is an interesting story. i have to go back a few years for a. seek out the experience and learn for them. peering into the rocket nozzle of spaceshipone -- one of the rocket scientists came over with von braun in 1946. he died just this last year. i tried to involve these guys.
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max does not have an engineering degree, but he is the one who designed the shape of the mercury capsule. you know, that down on the bottom and the low seats? -- ? dome on the bottom and the los seats? he did that. he designed the german icap sold. that is some kind of euro. -- hero. and by the way, for two and a half years of the first three years of the space program we were covert. we did not tell anybody we were doing at. we made an announcement we were going to roll out a new surprise. and i thought of max, because i thought, he ought to come here and tell me whether this would work. i really respect him if he did
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all that neat design. i said, maps, this is something really new. you love got to tell me -- max, this is something really new. you have got to tell me if this will really work. i said, max, what do you plan to do with the rest of your life? the next day his daughter called me and said, i am bringing him. and he was there for the rollout. unfortunately, and he died a few months later and never saw it live, but it was kind of cool to have max their. -- there. this is wrong way corrigan. you know, to avoid regulations, he crossed lindbergh. he claims he was going to
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california. he showed up in scotland. he advised me on how to do around the world regulations for flight. this is a candid picture. believe me. it is not opposed. here i am learning from buzz aldrin. i ran this companies for 30 years. i never bought an ad. we advertise to hire people, but we never advertised products. i have always found -- it is a good lesson -- do something so cool that a magazine will put it on the cover. that is much better than a purchased ad inside. another thing, and you won't appreciate this until after you retire, but involve your family. with the things that you do. and called them.
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tanya -- this picture was taken by me holding the camera up here. she is in the back of spaceshipone. we were taking it to oshkosh. she is the only person to ever fly from lockheed to -- in spaceshipone. that is kind of cool. she can talk about that. giving your family the chance to be involved in things is important. ok, thank you very much. [applause] we will open it up for questions. >> [indiscernible]
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>> hello? yes. i was wondering how you solve the reentry issue in terms of the heat buildup? >> heat shield reentry is not an issue -- it is especially not an issue for sub orbital space flight. when you go to support it, you are at mach 25. when you fly a suborbital flight, where you are giving people four minutes total weightless, seven minutes of black sky -- by the way, the most expensive way to fly in space permanent -- when you do that, you do not even have to go to mach 4. it is very nonlinear. the heating is a lot more than
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twice. bottom-line, it if we flew with no thermal protection at all, it was scorched the paint and damaged the outside of the composite material and that is all it would do. so it would last forever. it just turns brown and does not char. >> thank you for being such a rock star engineer. i really look up to that. u.s. spoken this whole evening about inspiration and the fact that everyone that you look up to was inspired at some time. i wonder if you have your own branch whose sole purpose is to inspire youth? >> you know, i am very familiar.
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i was judged at the first u.s. first competition. i was invited to be a judge and the competition was just too high schools in manchester the first year. so i am very familiar and supportive of that. i gave a talk at a brand new charter school in my home town where they are starting off kids with robotics between the ages of 6 and 13. boy, are they excited to go to school. let's see. the big problem that we had that we never could even do a student summer co-op program -- the problem is, our company was so small that it was hard for us to build barriers from one project to another.
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everyone of them essentially is nonpublic. richard branson is program, he tells everyone about it. in almost every other program, they don't want to leave that information. if you bring in some kids for the summer, they will invariably tell their classmates when they go back to school things they are not supposed to. we always thought that was too risky and we were never able to do part-time or summer hire. we never did get into the education thing at all. we are focused on doing a job. my point on education is that there is something revolutionary that needs to happen. if you look now in the internet age and realize the rate at which a student of loads -- or download information -- bordallo
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disinformation, his 12 years of education -- borat download information -- or downloads information. the people who are really smart our board -- our board. i think we then maybe 20-25 years, you won't see a classroom typically like we do, where you say everybody goes to a classroom. it is for that reason, it is not a good thing to teach people who are going to be innovators later on. next question. >> thank you very much for your talk. what skills, academic, etc., do
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you need at early ages to facilitate creativity and innovation? how can parents and schools shape these attributes for kids? >> in answering that, i am going to focus on one or that you said. you said cultivate. -- one word that you said. the. i have tried to make in this presentation is that -- the point i have tried to make is that if things are going around in the world outside of the kids community -- the kid goes the community, outside of his local interface and outside of his school, if he sees wonderful progress happen, that is so different -- that is why we are
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intelligent species. animals don't see big differences during a lifetime. humans do. -- ift think uncultivated you try, then you do what nasa is doing with education. they are sending old astronauts and their to inspire kids and they are going to run out of the old astronauts, the ones that really did find things. another 15 years and nasa cannot even do that anymore to inspire. what is going to make it happen is for things to happen outside of the education system and then kids themselves are inspired in themselves. the ones that have the creativity, the drive, the passion. they will go out and do it themselves. i was never taught to be creative. i don't know how to teach anyone
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to be creative. all i can say is that if wonderful things happen around you when you are young, especially, you are more likely to be creative when you are an adult. >> looking down the road, do you foresee a lifting crap that will help us go to mars, let's say? >> when i was a kid, in 1955, i was 12 years old. werner von braun and walt disney world and disneyland television. i did not have television, but a neighbor did. i went over and watch that and it was the most impressive thing i ever saw. keep in mind, this was before sputnik. and he was showing how we know how to go to mars, and we will send hundreds of people to mars, and here is the model, and here's what it will all look like. wow. by the way, go back and look at
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all that stuff. it is really cool. i have a college textbook that talks about mars from that time period. of course there are plans there because the telescope sees color changes. we may never know if there is intelligent life on mars. now here is a guy saying we can go, and i am a 12-year-old kid watching television. wow, you talk about something exciting. man, i am going to try to go, right? well, now, what does a kid do today? nasa has really screwed up. they send these robots and they land them out in the desert. they don't let any of them downtown. [laughter] and the kids, me included, are saying, why do we want to go to mars? it looks like the mojave desert. it looks just like where i spent the last 46 years.
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next question. >> could you comment on the commercial space like contractors that have been contracting with the federal government to replace the shuttle? and could you comment on where the commercial space ports of the future will be located? >> well, for its of oracle manned spaceflight, there is a plan -- suborbital based -- manned spaceflight, making use any airport with a 12,000 foot runway. branson is considering doing it in an isolated place in new mexico. i tried to talk him into doing it in a place where there is an ocean and something worth looking. at any rate, his plan to put spaceports in five or six different countries, he wants to
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do one or you can let people see the northern lights during your space flight. so he has some really neat ideas about where it could be done. when you look at where funds are available for a , there is one planned -- for ace baseboard -- a space port, there is one plant in dubai. -- 1 planned in dubai. there is not one state or affordable enough to fly into orbit, so i suggest that we had better solve that problem and then think about what day space port would look like. -- what a space port would look like. >> your thoughts on using model aviation as a funnel for youth
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to get into aircraft engineering, because your friends at the faa are trying to lump us then with the uab program. >> not just the faa. they are now in the air force debating how do you give an air medal to a person that lives of drone -- that applies a drone and kills people in more, and that night goes to las vegas show and sleeps with his wife. that is actually happening today. those grown things are flying just outside of las vegas -- drone things are flying just outside of las vegas. is that a hero test pilot? that is a big debating thing right now in the air force. it is not just faa drone issues. as far as can unmanned operate
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in the u.s. system, there are ways to do that. they are extremely restrictive. a pilot must be able to look outside and sea traffic and then it.n so he does not hit ye they are still working that problem. essentially what happens now in the u.s., the drones will fly in a restricted area and climb up above for all the other traffic is, and then it can go anywhere wants. next question. >> first of all, i need to apologize because there may be people in this room who can answer it already for me. we have a former decommissioned military base called cecil
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field. can you hear me? it was under my impression that it was trying to maintain its viability by trying to become a space port. >> what did you call it again? >> cecil field, in florida. my question is, if it is to succeed, how can compete with the kennedy center, which is three hours away, which has essentially been trying to do the same thing since the space shuttle was the commission? >> let me tell you, the most important thing about air launch of a spacecraft, and i am working now -- by the way, the biggest airplane in the world is able to launch satellites, it could operate out of the mojave
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airport. it does not have to operate at vandenberg or the cake. elon musk tried to operate out of brandenburg, and it was so difficult. i don't have time to explain why. you can google it and find out. he left and bought an island in the south pacific in order to launch. now that he is getting billions of government money, now he is able to work out of the cape. he does his falcon nine launches there. i think having the freedom to do this without the standing army that thinks they are there to regulate you, i think that is extremely important, particularly on cost. one of the reasons that the shuttle became so expensive in the early days is they started it too soon after apollo.
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all those guys seemed to think that they still had jobs to do. maybe i should not have said that in florida. [laughter] but let me just speak for commercial suborbital space flights. those absolutely will not be done on any government sites. the affordability is just totally out of the question. >> hello. thank you for coming this evening. i have been following your career since voyager with some degree of enthusiasm, so it is wonderful to see you in person. my question is directed at commercial space flight, but not for space tourism, but for intercontinental and across continental travel.
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i want to know, in your mind, what do you think are the largest barriers to creating a cost-effective platform to actually design, build, and market a vehicle that can basically be the times and speeds that the concorde did? >> first of all, let me explain to you. branson, he always ask why can i not use what you were doing here to fly passengers to sydney in half an hour. the flood of a spaceship includes acceleration of less than two minutes, probably closer to 1 minutes, and then when it reaches the atmosphere it decelerates over about a minute. so you have that picture. if you try to do that to fly from los angeles to sydney, australia, your parabola would go many times higher than the international space station, and you could not survive reentry.
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so what you have to do is either breed air in the atmosphere, and which -- breathe air in the atmosphere, but we have not run them long because they melt. that is why all these hypersonic jets have only run for seconds, not minutes or hours. another way, of course, is to go on up to a low altitude, like to moderate thousand or 300,000 feet, and accelerate. -- like 200,000 or 300,000 feet. you would spend most of the trip decelerating in the atmosphere, building up all this heat. so it does not make any sense to use rocketry to go to sydney, because the physics do not make any sense. [indiscernible]
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>> i was not thinking about starting a company when i did the wind tunnel. that was the question. i was just trying to build an airplane for myself, and i was afraid to fly it, based on what i had learned in school. i could not afford to do wind tunnel testing, so i did build a model. i build a unique kind of wind tunnel mouth and i put the whole rig way above my it dart station wagon, and i was seen driving at night at 80 miles an hour out in the desert. it had nothing to do with my business. i did that when i was just trying to learn enough so that i would not be too afraid to build my first airplane.
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can we get a mike for her? you will not be heard by c-span if you do not have a mike. and i know you want to be heard by c-span. i don't, either. i shouldn't have said that. [laughter] you can say anything when you are retired, right? >> i know you are disappointed with lack of youth interest in general. iraq's move closer so i can hear you. -- >> move closer so i can hear you. >> i know you are disappointed with the lack of youth interest in aerospace engineering. >> for someone who really wants to do it, in spite of the fact that there is nothing going on? great, go for it. unfortunately, here is what i
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think is a problem. it is not the students' fault. after we had done these wonderful things that first 10 years, if we had a commercial for students are whatever, great ideas, it would have a reasonable chance of getting funding, because these things are possible. i can understand your desire, particularly since i know that you will do a lot more in your lifetime than you think you will right now -- i can understand your desire, but what you will run into is they will look at, well, how much is this going to cost, how long will it take? let's study it. if they study the last 30 years, they will say, i am sorry, i enjoyed your passion, but i
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certainly cannot invest in this, because it is impossible for you to do something quickly so i can get a return on investment. that is the environment, really, and has little to do with the overall world business environment. it is a question of confidence. the insurance company, they did not think it could happen. that is the same reason, the same pressure that will keep you from getting funding. that being said, find a way. do it. when i said he will do a lot more, i believe that every person of your age or younger, every person in the earth your age or younger, can go into orbit in his lifetime if he wants to. think about that.
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have people been able to say ?hat' or at least two space. >> i wanted to thank you protecfor taking time out of yoy to come and talk to us. have you ever grown tired of your craft, and if so, how do you continue and improve your drive toward your career? >> have i grown tired in designing and building airplanes? >> yes. >> you know, i thought i did when i retired. i spent the last four months of a 46-year career working 70 plus hours a week, working in the shop.
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i wanted to get the flying car, that new design, flying before april 1, when i was going to retire. i worked on christmas day, a few months before i retired, because i had to get that done. so i worked very hard. and it did fly the day before i retire, which was kind of cool. the next day, a couple of days later, i am driving north, and i said, you know, i started my career working very hard because we had o1a priority testing during a hot war. i can remember working all weekend and not even going home, because i was to get data to vietnam during the siege of case
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-- our ability to supply equipment without landing, i worked so hard on that because our troops were in trouble. that is just one example and kind of the whole career was like that. i did not realize i was tired until i retired. i was not driving, my wife drove, and i just relax. and i said, you know, i really am tired. and i didn't do anything in engineering or airplane design for more than a year. cold turkey. and then i had this idea for a new plane. >> i have a quick question regarding the most recent jump
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by felix baumgartner. how the ec that driving the privatized space industry and influencing kids that want to get into the industry? >> what was it -- how do you see that driving the privatized space industry? >> it was done many years before. what baumgartner did was a milestone only because he went high enough so that he actually fell at supersonic speed. he broke the sound barrier with his body. other than that, he was just doing a jump 20% higher than the last jump. so he did a milestone, and history will show that he was the first one to go supersonic
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with nothing but a parachute and a pressure suit. i don't know that there is anything really earth shattering, technically, about that that will lead to other breakthroughs. there might be on some space to design or whatever, but i am not aware of anything that you are referring to. >> you spoke to us about nasa's great accomplishments and some of its shortfalls. if you have the ability to council president what direction to give nasa, what would you ask him to do? >> the current president, i
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don't think that would go well. [applause] how would i advise a president who is not interested in nasa doing rector technologies and doing exploration like it did in the 1960's -- doing better technologies and doing exploration like to get in the 1960's? is that a better question? i was telling him that the public's has an expectation for this $18 billion, that you spend a large percentage of it, maybe even a large majority of it, on pure research. in other words, i want you to take my tax payer money and go out and try to do something that
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you may not be able to do. in fact, i call it research only if half the people think is impossible. if most of the people think it is possible, then you are doing development. you are not a research organization. if you took anybody out of nasa, out of engineering, i don't care if they were head of nasa or a secretary or a shop guy, when jfk got up and said 21 days after alan shepard made this little flight, that we are going to go to the moon before 1970, everybody jumped up and down. you know why? multi-year funding. wow, we are going to have jobs for nine years. yes, we can do it. this is cool. we will beat the russians.
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everybody was real excited. grab any person, taking into a private room and locked the door and say to him, what is your net worth? tell me what you are worth. and then ask him a question. would you bet everything that you are worth that we will actually do that, go to the moon and back safely before 1970? it would have gotten a small minority -- you would have gotten a small minority. therefore, by definition, half the people thought it was impossible, and therefore, you had a right to gullett research. if nasa did most of its expenditure on things that half the people do not think is possible, we would have enormous breakthrough, and we would be going to the moons of saturn instead of not going to the moon that we went to 50 years ago. [applause]
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>> it is difficult for me to stand up. when orbital flight becomes commercially public and viable, who will be flying them, military pilots or commercial pilots? if they are commercial pilots, who would be trained them, and where would they be trained? >> portola flight, that is a good question. i had a chart that i did not use today -- orbital flight, that is a good question.
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one line showed the speed of the top performance military fighter, and then another line that showed how fast you could go as a public person, buying a ticket. and throughout history, first of all, when i was 14, the black line with all the way from subsonic orbit. military went up a lot, and commercial went up a lot. even when sr-71 and concord were flying, the military was faster. well, guess what? there is a possibility that in the next five years or so, for the first time, anyone here can buy a ticket and you can go faster and higher than any
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military person flying the most highest performance military fighter. and that has never happened before, has it? and i think that will piss them off. and you know why? look at the first iraq war. we had air superiority in 32 hours, so why do we need a faster, better fighter? there is not a requirement out there. so the military planners don't ask lockheed to do something that they probably could do, .ecause they don't neede it it was not the air force that asked billy johnson to build an sr-71. was the cia.
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-- it was the cia. there is no way the military would have funded such a program. it is really leadership thing and a decision thing. jfk you -- new nothing about rocketry. -- knew nothing about rocketry. maybe he watched disney television, too. but he challenged them to do something that was impossible. and he was smart enough to make that challenge. the problem that we have now, especially with earth at administration, they are not smart enough to challenge the american people and allow them to be exceptional. that is the main reason that we
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are not the success that we once were. [applause] >> out of all that you have done, what day be the most fun, the greatest pleasure? -- what gave you the most fun? >> that is like someone asked me what is my favorite airplane, and i always say the next one. i stopped answering that in 2004, because i realized that spaceshipone, and what we did with a tiny amount of lalanmonee developed our own rocket engine, for the simulator and avionics -- the holt rocket test
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facility, we did all of that. it was so far above, not just the public understanding that it was a cool thing, but in house, it was an enormous feeling of accomplishment. paul allen did give us some of that $10 million, and i was able to hand out that money to every employee that worked with me. i gave them some of that $10 million. when we flew to space and had to put payloads in there because we were not flying people, i gave envelopes to every employee and i said, put something in here that is yours, that is personal to you. i will never even look at it. and we will bring it back and give it to you, having flown in space.
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and everyone of my employees put pictures of their kids are whatever. -- or whatever. i flew my slide rule from college. i have a lot of stuff that has floated in space. the know how much personal stuff you get to take a long -- do you know how much personal stuff you get to take along? what nasa lets you take? bible led to take your girlfriend or your dog. yourey won't let you take girlfriend or your dog. what they let you take is about the size of three wallets. my employees on stuff that floated in space, and i think that is really cool.
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because of that, and the fact that in 2004, by the criteria of how many world newspapers cover the story above the fold on their newspaper, above the fold is the big news of the day. how many world newspapers cover firstory, spaceshipone's space flight in june of 2004, was beat no. 2 story of the entire year. by that criteria, it would have been number one if in 2004 we had not drive saddam hussein out of his spider whole. -- drug saddam hussein out of his spider hole. i do not believe i will see anything as rewarding as what we did in house, with that team
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that was able to do that. >> general aviation is in the doldrums again, even though we seem to have a new generation of aircraft out there. do you see a pathway for general aviation to be generally accessible to the public in the future? >> i did not understand the first part of the question. >> i was saying general aviation is again in the doldrums. but we do have relatively new generation of aircraft out there. >> well, we really don't. in 1997, i thought we were going to have one. the vision that we started off eroded so badly into an eclipse,
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which is not something interesting. it is just a scaled-down learjet. when he was trying to do was make an airplane that would cost about $85,000. that would have revolutionized general aviation and it was technically feasible. it required research, but i think that research would have worked. that would have been revolutionary. other than that, i don't see anything really significant in general aviation since the 1950's, really. look at the fighters today. look at the airliners. the 787 and the airbus 380, the
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newest airliners, they don't go any faster or any higher than they did in 1968. the fighters today are not faster or go higher than the fighters we had in 1958. they got better radios, and they are stealth, but all airplanes were stealth before somebody invented radar. [laughter] so there has not been really breakthroughs in performance in any of those ^ -- in any of those categories of airplanes. maybe some of these youngsters here will do that. [inaudible] >> you are welcome. >> i think that at the age of
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24, the idea was promoted in certain articles and i think it was a completion of politics -- a cancellation of politics. -- conflation of politics. there was no agenda, the charts that we were somehow the midwife to a public policy on coercive interrogation was absurd. it is absurd. which is to say that if there was an issue, if, in fact, our content was affecting the behavior of interrogators in the field, even if it was. 05% of those interrogators were taking their cues from jack maurer, to try to disabuse them of the fact that this is a
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television show -- and again, i may be a pollyanna about it, but i think it was a very valuable thing. >> tonight at 8:00 on c-span, home movies and television portray politics and policy making. followed at 9:28 by george will on the historical link between religion and politics. at 10:50, singer-songwriter and james taylor, on c-span. >> the senate returns to legislative business on thursday and house as a performance session scheduled that day. the senate is in at 10:00 a.m. eastern for work on two bills. the first would extend provisions of the foreign intelligence surveillance act. the other is a relief package for those affected by hurricane sandy. you can follow live coverage of
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the senate on our companion network, c-span2. house members are on standby as negotiations continue on the so- called fiscal cliff. >host: we turn our attention to unemployment insurance and health benefits could be impacted. joining us is josh boak. when we are talking about unemployment insurance, what specific programs are talking about here? guest: unemployment insurance is a combination of federal and state program. usually last 62 weeks. it is that extension beyond that
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six months time frame that we are talking about as part of the fiscal cliff tops. that is what automatically expires. we know that it costs about $30 billion continuing those additional unemployment benefits. president obama said it is part of a deal that i want to make, those benefits should continue. the public has to take a firm stand. we have seen in the past that obama had to cut a deal in order to get those extensions. host: what specific benefits to these programs provide? guest: the usual weekly cash payout is about $300 a week. sometimes it can vary. in mississippi i want to say it is closer to do hundred dollars. host: how are the programs usually bonded?
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guest: there funded by payroll taxes. the state administers the programs and the money goes to the unemployed. host: talk about what qualifications people have to meet in order to apply. guest: generally you have to have basically a year of earnings. the earnings have to be a certain threshold. you have to have been let go from a job. it is not like you can just wore mauve and a cloud of anger and qualify for benefits. if you have been working at the mill 14 years, and lose your job and a layoff, it is pretty easy to get benefits. host: we have some of those qualifications a person must meet on the screen there. for people who have lost the job of no fault of their own, explain what that means.
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guest: you have to be laid off, and there is a difference between being laid off, fired, or let go for economic reasons, corporate downsizing. it is not like you cannot get unemployment benefits if you were to leave in dramatic fashion by quitting your job of your own accord. host: water the estimates about the impact of unemployment insurance if it is not extended in the fiscal cliff talks? guest: it is negative. if they do not get -- they spend less, and that is bad for the economy. we know what the congressional budget office said. the $30 billion cost of extending these programs would generate $33 billion. that is because this money trickles through the system.
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that money is spent on food, housing, heating, all of those basic necessities and give us a multiplier effect. host: this is from the national unemployment law program. nearly 1 million workers will run out of state unemployment benefits without access by the end of the first quarter of 2013. take us through those numbers a little bit, and specifically that 1 million more workers, how they would be impacted. guest: there are two fundamental programs. the important thing about them, this is really what counts in this, is that they provide those
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additional benefits at that six- month mark. if workers don't get those additional benefits, and they will be forced into other kinds of government programs, like welfare. that creates additional costs for the government. that is one important consideration to make. the other thing is over the course of the year, as many as 10 million americans get on unemployment. that is a pretty sizable jump. right now, of 12 million unemployed americans, about 40% of them have been unemployed for longer than six months. so you are looking at resizable numbers. host: again, we are talking with josh boak. >> tomorrow morning, a look at the biggest foreign policy events of 2012.
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our guest is eli lake. then, the biggest political stories of 2012 with political analyst juan williams. every day at 7:00 a.m. eastern on c-span, washington journal. c-span recently spoke with to retiring lawmakers -- two retiring lawmakers. mr. bertin served in congress for 39 years and chaired the house oversight committee. senator conrad served 20 years and chairs the senate budget committee. our interview with congressman burton is at 8:00 wednesday night, and senator conrad follows at 8:30. now, a conversation on the global economy with yana huss
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for this office -- this is an hour and 10 minutes. [applause] >> ladies and gentlemen, france, this is a singular honor to be a guest in this temple of civic life. thanks to all the good people for making this possible, to my publisher, the staff that are manning the barricades outside. my novel is debt crisis and the future of the world economy.
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i will be arguing that there is no such thing as a debt crisis. there is no debt crisis in the united states of america and europe, and there is no such thing as the debt crisis in my own country, which is nevertheless being consumed by debt. you know the joke about balloonist. the balloon has been blown off course, and at some point they manage to gain control of the balloon and lower it above a farm. the farmer comes out and looks up at the balloon and one of the balloonists says, excuse me, sir, where are we? and the farmer says, you are in a balloon. the balloonist says, he must be an economist. precisely accurate, and hopelessly useless.
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we have a doctor here amongst us. imagine if you had a terrible case of a cancer patient in acute pain, and your diagnosis was, the person is experiencing a pain crisis. debt is simple -- it is a symptom of 2008, to be precise. it is what happens when a financial implosion begins on wall street, and then all sorts of dark forces break out, break loose, and they start dismantling the economic and social fabric of the world.
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our children were unfortunate enough that we had such an event a few years ago, back in 2008. let me be a little bit more precise about questions concerning debt. in this country, a whole spectrum of political opinion is pinpointing death, especially federal debt, as a major problem. it is quite provocative, on my part, to be saying there is no such problem. that me explain why think this. after to delegate -- after 2008, what has occurred, in this country and europe and elsewhere, is what i refer to as a twin peaks problem. one peak is this mountain of unsustainable, and recoverable debt and irretrievable losses,
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primarily losses in the financial sector. one huge peak. you look at in you think, oh, my god, a debt crisis. then there is another peak behind it that is often not seen, overshadowed. it is 8 peak of huge, gigantic and savings with no place to go. the world we live in has the highest ratio of savings. we have accumulated profit and savings would know where to go, too fearful to be invested in productive uses, simply because of the crisis. this is the twin peaks, have been referring to. . don't mean there is no debt
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the debt is a huge problem just like a cancer patient has a problem with pain. but it isn't healthy to be thinking in terms of the debt crisis. we might as well refer to the crisis we are going through as the savings crisis, a crisis caused by too much savings. if you have never heard anyone from -- you have ever heard anyone from bloomberg refer to it as a crisis of a glut of money would know where to go, but it is, just as much as it is a crisis of debt. let's begin at the beginning. let's talk about debt. reading the mainstream outlets, newspapers, or listening to the idiotic stations like fox, he
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would think that it is possible to have capitalism without debt. recall of feudalism. what was the process that led to the accumulation of wealth? it began with production. they produce wheat, corn, so production came first. then came distribution. that would come in and take a large part of that mountain of corn for distribution between the peasantry and the gentry.
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the landlord would sell in the rudimentary, marginal market, his surplus. and with the money, indulge in some money lending. so you had production, distribution, and financial. -- financialization. what you had was the perfect reversal of the process. so how is capitalism different than feudalism? once the peasants were thrown off the land, they became landless peasants. some were kept by the landlord
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and they were involved with sheep and wool. it became an international commodity. it could be exchanged for silken india and the silk exchange for stores in japan, and those sorts would be sold back in england and the whole thing would start again. so the ex-peasant who is now running the show on a small plot of land handed over to him by the landlord would be an entrepreneur. effectively, he borrowed money from the landlord in order to pay for things, and pitiful wages in the form of corn, to the ex-peasant who were now wandering in the countryside knocking on doors because they
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don't have direct access to land. so land, labor, and capital, could be purchased in advance of production, on the basis that the entrepreneur, ex-peasant has to the landlord. so debt comes first, then comes distribution of income in the form of a labor contract. it will work for so many hours and i will give you so much corn. it was a combination of this reversal of the order from having production followed by a distribution, followed by debt, to having debt first, then distribution, then production. in conjunction with the great improvements in technology that
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unleashed the powers of capitalism, and capitalism manage to produce immense wealth. something unpleasant but absolutely necessary. in a sense, capitalism is about ecological economics, even though capitalists don't want to hear this. it is about recycling. we had heard of the term by the 1970's, especially about the green movement in europe. the process of described is a process whereby the entrepreneur is now forced to be an entrepreneur. they did not choose to be entrepreneur is.
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-- they did not choose to be on to print your -- are to print your -- they did not choose to be entrepreneurs. in tuesday at. that is dead. producing the wealth, from which they hoped they would pay the debt. moneylenders, bankers. covering the fact that he had already paid wages, hoping that there would be something less for -- left for him. the fact that there is recycling -- you take a value for the future, bring it into the present, so as to develop -- delivered the body to the future. the problem with this process
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is once you start it and it works, you make a lot of money out of its. and history suddenly starts being measured in terms of years instead of decades or centuries, because of what capitalism did. it accelerates through technology and weaponization. so, you want to use it more and more faster. the trouble is, if you overreach and take too much value from the future, you will create too much debt at some point. he will not be able to generate enough volume to deliver to the future. there is the second problem, still -- too. the places and the regions and sectors in which this dynamic capitalist process pushes the
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boundaries of technology to create wealth, those are the servant riches. it is always localized. so, manchester northern england was in surplus back then. southern england was in debt. now is the obvious. similarly, you have new york state in surplus, washington state in certification plus. illinois, the dakotas in debt. in greece, a permanent bailout. the thing is, whereas markets are an easing institutions for allocating existing goods and
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services among consumers, they are chronically bad at creating a surplus between deficit regions. remember -- if that comes first, suddenly the money lender who later becomes a banker who later becomes wall street plays a hugely significant role in this process. the banker is the conduct of that -- conduit of that recycling mechanism. when they get an increase in proportion as the result of their mediation of that process. the banker is the same thing as a clothes maker.
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suddenly, there are two things that must have been. 1 -- society will demand that banks are not allowed to go to the wall. then bankers are affectively blanche, free money for themselves. and the whole mechanism breaks down in 2008. in the eurozone, we made a huge error in europe of binding together these economies. this is not the first time these things that happened. it happened in the united states of america. you have disparate economies in the united states of america that are bound together monetarily. what is it that keeps the united states together? you had a great expression in the 1930 -- you had a great
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depression here in the 1930's. things what awful. and yet, i do not believe there were any political movements like there are in europe and portugal and spain and everywhere else that happens to be in deficit. the reason is, the federal- state, especially after 1929 plays the role of the regulator of surplus and deficit recycling around the land. we are in seattle. when boeing goes to washington to give a contract for the next generation jet or whatever, they may get it. they do get it. but there are some things attached. like for instance, we want a
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factory that builds the wings are the engines in tennessee or missouri or arizona. this is an act of recycling surplus so the surpluses of the surplus state can continue to be created, produced. fixed exchange rates. that gold standard creates a a degree of growth, together with the emergence of state corporations like edison that allows the bankers to run riot, to bring value to the peasant and to recycle. and that is what led to the collapse of 1939, which was that
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generation's version of 2008. when that collapse happened, what you had was unsustainable debts coming irresponsible banking -- unsustainable that's, irresponsible banking. you had the collapse of the currency. it is what we have not now increase, exactly the same. -- in greece, exactly the same. the generation that came to power in 1932 were exceptionally fearful of what would happen to the united states of america after 1944. because they very much feared that after the stimulus went through, after the stimulus of the second world war was over with the emergence of peace, the great depression would come back. they have learned their lessons
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from the gold standard here. and they did that. bay reconstituted, they reintroduced -- eight reconstituted, they reintroduced a system of global exchange. all the countries around the world were locked at this specific exchange rate into the dollar. but it would not repeat the error of the 1920's adjust binding together the economies of the world without having a mechanism to recycle surplus is around the world, but because it was that lack of a mechanism that brought about the disaster of the 1930's. those in power in washington in 1944 onwards were aware of the need for the surplus mechanism. interestingly, in new hampshire
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in 1944, there was a big clash between people in the united states, and the british influence -- someone you may have heard of, john maynard keynes, the famous economist. both agreed that the local system of fixed exchange rates had to come with what was missing in the 1920's. and what was that? was the global surplus recycling mechanism. disagreed on what one should look like. keynes represented the declining empire. the dominant country recommended a multilateral policy. a world bank. full representation. different countries on its.
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and international clearing union, what i referred to as a global surplus for cycling mechanism. and we should all agree. but the united states said, no, mate. dollar surpluses, you cannot have any. the only accredited nation on the surface of the planet is the united states of america. we will recycle precisely the way that we choose and we are not going to start this recycling mechanism into a kind of united nations. it is indeed the case that from 1949 until 1960 onwards, the united states of america recycle 70% of its surpluses to germany and japan. an astonishing number. 70% of the profits in the country were recycled into
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europe and japan. the marshall plan is a very small target. i will not bore you with details. when they go to washington, it is not an act of philanthropic on the pentagon -- and at the plant for be on the pentagon fell apart -- it is not a philanthropic act on the pentagon's part. the united states federal government -- unless europe is dollar rise, unless they do not have dollars to spend purchasing the net exports of those who have surpluses, then they will stop having surplus. this is the surplus recycling mechanism. thus, we have the 20 years of the golden age.
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a period of immense stability very low inflation. universal growth. we had other problems. the lease from the macroeconomic point of view, it was a golden age. why is that? because the global surplus of recycling mechanism was sustained. why? because the united states stopped having a surplus by the end of the 1960's. how can you recycle surplus if you cannot have it. well, paul volcker -- been named may ring a bell. in 1971, paul volcker was an unknown working for another american. henry kissinger, who you may have heard of. before he became secretary of
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state. volcker's paper, which are when i read a few years ago, i thought it was the most remarkable document ever to emerge from washington in the last few years. looking at the emerging economies of the world -- primarily germany and japan at the time -- how will be paid back germany? he said we could not recycle our own surpluses. we must recycle other people's surpluses. and this is what happened and 1978.e mid-1970's the u.s. utilizing its trade deficit with the rest of the world has been operating like a
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huge vacuum cleaner. thus providing exporters -- germany, japan, or china -- with the requisite demand necessary. so, the ever expanding trade deficit was not an accident. it was a very clever way of replacing one that surplus recycling system with another. it was one where america had a surplus and america decided instead of doing what germany is doing at the moment -- which is cutting its nose to spite its face, and thereby ending the recession by cutting, cutting, cutting -- volcker as the head of the fed at a different idea.
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we are going to expand our dominance and are well by expanding our deficit and using our deficits to provide the rest of the world with the demand which is necessary to grow their economies, even at the expense of hours. and who is going to pay for the deficit? if i have an ever-expanding deficit, the bank tells me it is came over. but if you are the united states of america and there are certain other factors that i will touch upon later, what you can do is you can expand your deficit as long as you create the circumstances so that german entrepreneurs, later chinese, take their profit, which they
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earned and they send it to wall street. thus closing the cycle, the recycling loop. so, effectively what we have between 1940's and 1971, 1973, you had global surpluses being recycled from united states to the rest of the world. the capitalist world. the western world. ok? so, the united states was an exporter to europe and japan. it was making profits. it was then recycling to europe and japan. so they would keep on buying. once the surplus shifted to japan, germany, and china, the idea that volcker had was a we will swap this. we will just turn it on its head. we will expand our deficit so they can expand their profits,
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and thus it is still sustaining -- self sustaining and will finance our deficits. and this is precisely how it worked. and the trouble was -- and if you want to understand exactly how the capital gains profits were attracted to the united states -- there are some key elements. one was the commiseration of blue-collar workers in united states. prices in the united states rose more slowly than they did in japan or europe. so, if you were japanese or german, the profits, where do you invest them? where do you keep them? you keep them with the low inflation rate. that is one reason. one mechanism that helps attract the capital from the rest of the world and close the loop.
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wall street was another. it has an amazing capacity to create a physical value out of nothing. walmart was another. is promoted the ideology of cheapness, which was calculated so brilliantly. nobody needs a gallon of pickles and. -- a gallon of pickles. y was walmart producing yet? i think it was a symbolic gesture to establish the importance of low prices as an indoor in of themselves. and in the process squeezing labor costs here and elsewhere and creating the circumstances for profit rates to rise higher and faster to attract german and japanese capital into the united states of america. now, what do you think bankers
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do when you give them $5 billion every day net? the get $35 billion -- this is the tsunami of capitalism. on average, every working day, monday through friday on wall street, $3 billion to $5 billion net. what do they do? i will tell you what they do. they find a way to make it grow for themselves. that is what bankers do. now, we can spend countless hours discussing how they didn't -- how they did it. a quality production a private money, if you want toxic money. it vaporizes the contained and
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sophisticated and intricate forms of debt. it is being utilized by banks as a means of exchange as though it has value. it uses them, changes them amongst themselves, in order to store value that was going to the bankers in the form of bonuses. that is why they want to cash their share options. what is it? how do we define something that works as a means of exchange and total about you? money. the effective rate, bankers were given the license to print. it is as if they managed to discover an atm in the living room. therefore, what did they do? if i had one of those, i would keep using it. i cannot know what i would do,
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especially if nobody noticed. ok? you know, i mean, the problem with crises like the one we have now is there are multiple explanations for its. so, you hear a lot people talking about the fact that wall street bankers captured the politicians and regulators, and that is true, and thereby managed to avoid scrutiny. being swept away by people like mr. rubin and mr. geithner in the 1990's. that is true. agreed. greed is good. hollywood movies are about greed. wall street bankers were imitating gecko, like war movies that create warmongers. at the same time, you had
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another explanation which had to do with the way in which the finance tapped into a competing power. all that is true. but what is underlying this and the crisis and the reason why the world economy fails to recover is that this surplus recycling mechanism -- this weird, wonderful, audacious surplus recycling mechanism from 1971 which poker helped put together as the chairman of the fed -- which paul volcker helped put together is the chairman of the fed in the late 1970 fell and 1980's, it broke down. what happened was the united states of america lost its
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capacity to utilize its trade deficit in order to recycle other people's problems. if you look at the data analysis, and i am doing so in the context of the second edition of this book, you'll find an astonishing empirical datum. the united states is producing 30% less demand for the world's manufacturers than it was in 2009. remember recycling? the rest of the world -- whereas in 2007 they were financing the united states corporations to the tune of $500 billion a year, and now they are taking out $15 billion. so, america is not reducing demand for foreign
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manufacturers and foreign manufacturers are not -- is not producing demand for foreign manufacturers and foreign manufacturers are not sending their profits to united states. so, that lou which -- that look that operated so magnificently has broken down. the reason why europe is in such a shambles and the reason why the dragon is annexed written in china is we have lost about $1 trillion every year up demand for production globally. united states found a mechanism in 1944 and recreated in the 1970's. is 2008. we have not managed to -- since 2008, we have not managed to
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regain our boys. the emphasis about the public debate on debt is how much austerity pays to philanthropy in order to maintain what i call the new regime we live under, which is not capitalism. capitalism died in 2008. when i was growing up, i was having these very nice debates with liberal right wing sectarian -- they were debating about capitalism. they said it was all about the survival of the most efficient and significant. central planning is better, you know. or just. in 1991, the soviet union died.
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capitalism died. if it is true that capitalism is a social bar when this game that gives rise to the survival of the fittest, what happens in 2008 when we have the survival of the bankers? that is hypocrisy. not by banks, but by banker banks. and the more banker you are, the greater your power for the destruction of wealth to your society. so, this emphasis on debt is nothing more than a conspiracy in order to exploit prejudice and fear. because if i am right the what we have here is a breakdown of the surpluses in banking, which has a symptom of lot of debt and
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a lot of savings, and the two wipe out one another, this emphasis on debt is the revenge of herbert hoover and nothing more than that. if we look at one of the twin peaks and not at the other and cut down on debt, all we manage to receive its increased debt. in greece, we've had the most brutal, a substantial fiscal squeeze and in the history of humanity. if you look at the numbers, and nowhere before as the budget been squashed so solidly. and what happened to the debt? 129% to 200% of gdp. it is what happens. when you kill the cow that produces the milk, it will not produce more milk and if you keep hitting it, it will not produce more.
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we need to start recycling global surpluses again in an international way. the great advantage of having no qualms about lying through your teeth as politicians in this country and in my country have been known to do -- the story that i have been trying to tell is quite complicated. when in being interviewed by the media, you have about 20 seconds. if you say, well, we have too much debt. we will become the slaves of the chinese like these awful advertisements -- that is completely wrong. you can just go like this. is all over and done with.
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it is a story with a beginning, middle, and in. my story, i have been talking and fast for such a long time, and i have still not managed to piece it together fully. what i have been telling with a colleague of mine and friend -- we were trying to think of a matter for. and the matter further -- metap hor that i thought of was the global minotaur, which is the title of the book. one of the few advantages of being greek is you have a great wealth of mythologies, of myths to tell the story. so, i'm going to finish off by reading one page -- i am trying
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to save on paper. it is the story of the global minutes are -- then a star -- minotaur. one of the great joys of publishing this book is it appeals to people who do not know anything about economics and therefore are much more sensible than we economists are. one group of gadgets from the royal college of the arts want to create an animated story out of my book, and they asked me to write the script. see if you can recognize in this little story, which i was just dipping into greek mythology, the broader economic story that i have been relating to your support. ok. once upon a time in the famous
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labyrinth of the king's palace, there lived a creature as fierce as it was tragic. its intense loneliness matched only by the fear it inspired far and wide. you see, the minotaur had a voracious appetite which can only be satiated with/. the king, who secured peace, the one who enabled trade to crisscross the seas with bountiful ships -- alas, the beast's appetite could only be satiated by human flesh. every now and then by ship loaded with young slaves was bound to greece to deliver its human tribute to be devoured by
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the minotaur. i grew some ritual that was essential for preserving the peace and producing trade and prosperity. many years later a global minotaur rose up from the ashes of the first postwar face. it is there -- a form of labyrinth was greeted deep in the american economy. it of the form of the united states trade deficit which consumes the world's exports. the more the deficit grew, the greater its appetite for europe and asia as capital, and what made it truly global with its expansion. it took financial capital and
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kept the cleaning german factories busy. it gobbled up everything produced in japan and later in china. and for the american owners of these distant factories, they said their profits to wall street, a form of tribute to the global minotaur. what do bankers to when such a tsunami of capital comes their way daily? they find ways to make it grow on their behalf. , you saw 1985, 1990's an explosion of money minting on the back of the daily capital tsunami that floated to feed the global minotaur. just like its mythological predecessor, the global montara has kept the global -- the global minotaur has kept the
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economy going for decades. economy is simply not large enough to hold it so much private toxic money. money like a paper that burns down once the collapse begins. in this confederation, the global minotaur was wounded. while enroute help, the minotaur formed new forms of pleasure and new forms of deprivation. creating spectacular failures of common decency. whatever we think of the global he kept theeign, world going and thinking its regime was stable, moderate even.
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meanwhile, its gross excesses' remained out of sight. until some believe their own rhetoric -- read ben bernanke -- about moderation. minotaur he global was mortally wounded, it left the global economy in disarray. it has put the world in permanent crisis. the minotaur was slain by a brave warrior named thesues. our very own global minotaur died as the victim of wall street bankers. what will its demise bring?
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will be develop a system where no longer will abstract power waned while others get stronger? the global minotaur will be remembered as a remarkable piece to whose rain created and destroyed the aleutian -- the illusion that the global economy was stable. thank you. [applause] right. questions? ok, you have to line up. this is the way you do it here, isn't it? >> that is a brilliant vision of where we have been. can you elaborate a little bit more on where you see us going?
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>> very briefly, i think that we are in a state of sustained bewilderment. because, let's face it. in the 1930's, the new deal, despite some early successes failed by 1936 or 37. 1938, we have the second great depression. now we have a world economy which conceivably, that technically finds its way forward to plug the gaps and black holes. easily agreed to a plan that is very much like that which john maynard keynes proposed in 1944. it is a comedy of errors.
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the european leaders are competing to produce a plan that is more idiotic. they are so broke real -- parochial. they are beyond squabbles. europe therefore is the sick person of your. of -- of the world. meanwhile, the united states of america is ungovernable. you have a system in this country that was created to create this country as an ungovernable state. you have congress, the president canceling each other out. how the president -- whoever the president might be -- do anything? you have china -- finding it impossible to provide a
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replacement for the demand that the west has done away with. so, i do not have an answer for your question. bewilderment. >> my question is about consumer demand and the extent to which the old system depended on it. if we do not have it to the same degree, could there possibly be a new economy? i cannot know how to say all of these in the right economic terms. i will say what i am thinking and see what you make out of it. its teams like all the economy's got to a point where it had to be based on growth. it could not just be sustainable. it had to grow. and that meant more consumers. so, then, that led to a lot of things ecologically that were not good for the earth's, things that people did to maximize profits. so, that is one thing. is there the possibility there
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might be a new economy that is not based on growth? second, if you do not have consumer demand at the same level that he used to -- and of course, i think that is why. one of the pieces that you talked about is that americans are credible consumers come away more than europeans. americans will buy and other economies will not. what if consumer demand has changed? and the third thing is, in my own work i deal with a lot people that are getting divorced and not paying their mortgages. for the first time in seeing people say, we just won't pay our mortgage. and that would be unthinkable. previously people would do anything to save their home and their credit. now people do not care. all the time. they say, we just won't pay our mortgage, and they do. so, i think the consumer
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attitudes about consumption and debt are really different as a result of this crisis. i do not know of any of that means anything. >> do we have a couple of hours? it is very important to draw a distinction most economists do not draw. this has been a calamity for the planet earth. the distinction between growth and development. is one thing to say we want development and another thing to say we what growth. growth is often at the expense of development. so, do not believe in growth of co2 or poison or toxic derivatives. i think we should have a serious recession in these markets, these sectors. but i do believe in education.
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i believe we should invest in our education systems. smoker -- smaller class is. -- now one high a capacity schools because they produce morons. you mentioned something that i agree with. the reason why american consumers consume more than europeans is not a cause of some kind of punishment -- fundamental cultural difference. what you have -- first, america was the only country that had been effectively untouched by the war. so you had more consumption for durables. i am not sure that americans enjoy them. then, after that, what you have is a massive reduction in the
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real wage, the real median wage. i do not know if you know that. today we do not have a real median wage that is anywhere near where it was in 1976. what has been the effect is that1970's and 2008 living standards were being pushed into the ground, hours were being expanded to make ends meet. output enormous strains -- that put enormous strength and families. my friends in sociology say that this is correlated with a very fast rise in divorce rates in united states. you have the attempt to
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substitute the loss of quality with quantity. the walmart phenomena and. that is why i mentioned the pickle's. it is their. i have a psychoanalytic view of that. a person who feels exploited and works for nothing and has to work much longer hours goes into walmart, vice -- buys the jar and feels like he has been able to steal someone's labor. and that is very alienating. this kind of consumerism, which destroys the environment, which creates circumstances of the devolution of living standards -- this is the result of the global surplus recycling, which is why this squeezing of the
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delights of the workers to keep prices low, but to keep the price is lower than germany or japan, to keep the capital coming here, to keep the german and japanese finance going. we are all part of this system that we have created over the last few decades. which met its nemesis because of its hubris. >> i would like to a mosque in three questions. -- i would like to ask three questions. why did we slide further down in the world? could you please summarize an alternative approach? what could, for example, the greek prime minister have done instead of what they did it? and third, there is an economic
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system from 1789 that created a great america before america became a global power -- of that help greece? >> i will answer your questions starting at the beginning. let me put it this way. in our country, because you come from greece, too, they have been monopolizing the headlines. imagine if there was a fiscal crisis in the great state of delaware that could bring the united states down. i think you would agree if i were to suggest to you, there -- that suggest to you there was something wrong not with the state of delaware, but with the united states of america. if one state can monopolize the headlines for so long -- it is
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an indication there's something wrong with the world, right? it is like saying, oh, this snowflake cause the it lathrop -- the avalanche. this snowflake is to blame. even if you remove the snowflake. , greece has always flirted with indulgence. we have defaulted a number times over the last century. if it were another part of the eurozone, it would not have been in the headlines. it would be growing back again now. with all its malignancies and corruption, all the rubbish in our country. it has not been enough to stop the recovery from happened. we have done this before.
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we did it in the 1970's, the 1960's, the 1930's. when you lock yourself into a kind of gold standard -- let me or you a little bit with a history on the eurozone and the euro crisis. when the global minotaur was happening, america was single- handedly responsible for generating enough demand for germany, to be the exporter, to not have to worry about who was creating the equipment. exporteras the nets' with the eurozone and without the eurozone. i do not know how it happened that the eurozone could keep
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sailing like a beautiful river boat. but with the storm of 2008, they started sinking. and the people that were below decks were saying, why are you allowing the water to sink in. this is what is happening to greece now. is being fiscally water boarded. is complete madness. -- it is complete madness. we are repeating all the problems. now, what could the greek government have done? two greek prime minister's. 1 from 2004 to 2009. in greece, greece has had experience with that since 1974 after the expiration of parliamentary democracy. government, regardless of which
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party is in government, the accelerator to create some kind of flimsy growth, at some point it became clear that we had a cliff. and then we would hit the brakes. austerity. which creates increased unemployment. but nevertheless, the debt was manageable. they did this up until 2004. 2004 was accelerated because of the olympics. the next government should have stopped it. but unfortunately government is government. government kept the foot firmly on the accelerator. it is just like the subprime
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market here where people were coerced to take loans that could not afford. so, you had executives coming to greece, bribing politicians. the greek government -- they did not listen. then 2008. he is not a stupid man. he was a terrible prime minister, but he is not a stupid man. you know what he did? he bailed out. he affectively called for a general election. it was much worse than obama's first debates. he appeared before them and was like "don't vote for me." he lost that election. he has not spoken since.
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he is having a nice holiday. and then there was papandreou. who was a 2006. who unfortunately, he did not see the crisis of the eurozone collapse in. -- collapsing. the eurozone had no foundation. there was an earthquake. between 1995 and 2008 god and his angels descended on an athens and ran the show. with rationality, omniscience, egos, and morality -- ethos, and morality. greece would not have been the first domino to fall.
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but it would have been the third. grace would have fallen after ireland or possibly after portugal. it was never designed to sustain a crisis like 2008. we were doomed. finally, the united states that we know today is the result of the crisis of the 19th century and the early 20th century. 1 very preciously saw the crisis -- and still there is a commonality of debt, and effective recycling of debt, the road be no such thing as a nation that was sustainable. you had a crisis that led to a gradual, discreet, fundamental
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change from the pacific to the atlantic. many europeans, like you would imagine or hope, but this crisis in europe would also mean continental consolidation. i do not see that happening, for reasons i will not bore you with. it would be nice to have a united states of europe. >> i have a couple of questions and comment. what do you see in terms of inflation or deflation? my guess would be deflationary. for the average personal investor, what would you advise? my take is treasury-protected securities are pretty good way to go. [laughter] the last comment is -- but shouldn't crease -- shouldn't
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greece all its own tax collection? >> let me start with the last question before i start giving out financial advisor. [laughter] ries certainly should focus on dealing -- not so much with tax collection, but what i call tax immunity. they have a very cozy system of tax and unity. -- community. the tragedy is when you have an going to ake greece's tailspin and you have a massive immunization of national income, and the central bank is effectively kaput, you can really improve your tax collection methods because there is no income tax. people just do not make money any more. even the rich do not make money.
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other than the money they have already accumulated through geneva or frankfurt. they are not making money. how can you improve your tax mechanism when there's no income tax? that is the second question. the first question -- i am not worried about inflation at all. in this country, there is this fixation with quantity -- quantitative easing. bernanke's attempt to stabilize the american economy. it is a policy that i have encountered ever since i came to this country. mr. bernanke is printing money. he is not printing money. if it were, you could talk about the loss potential, which is different from deflationary.
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but what exactly is quantitative easing? i wish he could print money and give consumers the money they need to buy things and pay down their debt. because that does not it added. it relieves negative equity problems. that is why some people refer to him as helicopter ben. before he became the chairman of the fed, he said it would be a good idea in the middle of the great recession to do that. when he buys mortgage-backed securities from jpmorgan, right? affectively what he does is he creates an audit from which jpmorgan controls to pass these
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bank.to another jpmorgan cannot lend that money to you. the only way he can make this happen with qe is if there is an amazing equilibrium among the bankers, and at the same time, they must feel that as a result of this that interest rates will fall sufficiently for house buyers to order new homes from them, so they can make use of those new loans. that is why it as a result of this coincidence of optimism, it is nowhere to be found in this equilibrium of fear that we are experiencing. the money supply is not increasing.
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but bernanke loves to print money. my criticism of quantitative easing is what he is trying to do is to create a new bubble in mortgage-backed securities. we talk about toxic derivatives. they are not really toxic derivatives. what they are is paper priced at very low prices. he is trying to create a bubble. so, it is not a quantitative easing even. i call it price easing. i am not giving you a price on what to buy. i do not want you to blame me. >> unfortunately, that is all the time we have today. we will be having a sign. thank you for coming today. [applause]

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